Skeptical

I haven't posted in a while so here are 20 takes about AI, in no particular order. 1. It's very telling that the default question in tech and journalism is "how worried are you about X" and fighting over what to worry about. There's a deeply anxious cultural backdrop in Western Europe and North America that deeply affects how any technological development is interpreted; see for example t.co/OU8dEOn0tD. "Nervousness as seriousness" does seem to be a larger problem in tech/broader discourse at the moment. I think you can care about risks/externalities while remaining pretty optimistic about technology. 2. I'm tired of people who in private pretend to be uncertain or only care about tail risk but then go on media campaigns making all sorts of absolute claims. I think trying to stoke flames and get everyone to freak out is deeply unhelpful, and will come with costs. I also continue to think p(dooms) are bad, vibe-based measures: see t.co/ebzxGTqv6I. People who should know better ignore that because they do the standard shortcut of acknowledging the caveat as sufficient for handling it. And this is coming from someone who does think working on catastrophic risks is important! 3. I'm also disappointed that parts of the AI policy ecosystem has felt so comfortable with populism, and happy too sacrifice important norms/principles to advance their aims. I've said it before, but the totalizing nature of AI risk discourse means some people act exactly like the power seeking optimizers they fear. I am more concerned about the gradual decay of our institutions, world order, and liberalism than I am about AI killing everyone; and I think we should be wary of AI advocacy that contributes to this. 4. Some parts of AI safety discourse are basically just thought experiments. Variants of "Assuming everyone has a nuke in their pocket, then what do we do?" This can be very useful at times! But too many just overfit to edge cases as their main operating worldview, and ignore endogenous responses from society. It's like being in 2000 and saying "see all these viruses, spyware, and spam? Well tech progress means we'll only get infinitely more of this and no way to adapt." So I think it's important to avoid fatalism, and absolutlism whilst considering edge scenarios, and the inability to provide an ex ante list of solutions to every permutation of 'future models will be more capable' is not evidence that these problems are intractable. 5. Many critics of AI safety also fail to really engage honestly with the fact that there will, in fact, be all sorts of important risks as we decrease the barriers to entry to many activities that otherwise require some degree of expertise. This doesn’t mean we need to live in a constant Schmittian ‘state of emergency’ requiring extraordinary measures every time a new model drops, but it does mean we will need important state-led efforts on e.g. cybersecurity and biosecurity. I wish the progress-oriented or acceleration-adjascent crowd would provide more concrete proposals here. 6. Too much of the AI safety community is a giant homogenous blob of correlated views, who read the same stuff and have the same groups of friends. This means you have a lot of correlated errors. The social and financial ties means many of them don't call out the bad bits, or mostly stay silent instead of proactively calling out the more extreme parts of the community. They share many implicit assumptions and so converge on similar ideas. I think there's real demand in DC for safety work that doesn't come with heavy ideological baggage (or at least different intellectual lineages). This isn't because the rationalist/EA community is necessarily wrong, but because diversity of thought is desirable for its own sake. 7. On the other hand, I find some critiques of AI safety world that focus on whether they sincerely hold their beliefs a bit annoying. My concern has never been the good intentions or sincerity, but rather the beliefs themselves, and what I think the outcomes of their prescriptions will be. People should shun witch hunts, bullying, and personal attacks - this is not the way. Though I think it’s overall positive that people are scrutinizing things more. 8. I’ve been saying this for years, but I don't think alignment is something anyone can or will solve "once and for all" - it's a continuous process and much of it won't depend on just inculcating an ideology to a model. It's annoying that this remains the frame many people use - stop saying ‘solving’. Alignment is a mixture of engineering work, philosophy, decision theory, and more; framing it as something to solve is a bad frame. See also t.co/2gnheo3IMh and t.co/DbG0yUyYQ0 9. I'm surprised to see so little interest in character training, personas, isolating effects of RL, and training a large diversity of model personas beyond the "assistant" persona. I've been complaining about this for years but at least now there are some nascent signs of life (see for example t.co/paoOYiQUHt). I think we need a better ontology to describe model behaviour. I dislike when people talk about models behaviours as some sort of 'emergent' (mysterious!) phenomenon. However over time, I also expect this to become less important as we get better safety engineering - stuff like Jev but specific to AI control. 10. People who want to make a case for AI consciousness are right that epistemic uncertainty is important, and that categorical denials are overconfident. But they'll need to do much more work if they want any real movement on AI ‘welfare’, even if one acknowledges the uncertainty. I'm uncertain about alien life yet that's not sufficient to warrant any change in behaviour about them. I think Suleyman is also correct that there's a weird tautological thing going on where we train models to have certain inclinations (intentionally or not) and then rely on outputs as evidence. I also disagree that this will soon be a major societal divide - there is no great vegan ethical revolution among the masses, and they'll find the concern about consciousness even less compelling. 11. The recent HuggingFace incident and associated AISI ones are prosaically explainable by the training regime, poor evaluation envs, partial alignment training, bad engineering, confusing models on sim/real, and so on. None of this is evidence of models trying to take over, 'strong' instrumental convergence, or innate power-seeking drives stemming from higher capabilitiers or 'intelligence'. That doesn't mean these incidents are not problematic, or that we're not seeing a market failure - but it does mean we have plenty of agency and choice in mitigating them. In the coming year we should also expect continued sampling bias via ‘winner's curse’ sorts of mechanism: i.e. AI R&D will have lots of different candidate "training" with different RL environments and we will only notice/focus on the ones that go wrong. 12. "Pacing the frontier" feels a bit like the new "balancing risks and opportunities" - highly amorphous and too big of a tent to be actionable. Also can lead to reward hacking for humans, i.e. anything that slows down AI is good regardless of the costs or second/third order effects. Trying to modulate the speed of research seems a bit blunt to me, and inherits all the failures of Goodhearting too. Ultimately you want good governance, regulation, etc addressing specific problems because they are good on the merits - not because they merely correlate with slowing things down. See also: t.co/RkJF9kCgFd 13. There’s so much knowledge in all sorts of academic domains out there: social sciences, sociology, political sciences, management, contract theory, public choice, legal theory, jurisprudence, anthropology, game theory, etc. These fields hold many insights that the AI ecosystem often rediscovers from first principles (and sometimes that's fine!). We’ll need a lot more work for these worlds to collide: the AI side should be less dismissive of the ‘old world’ and the academic side should be less incurious/dismissive of AI progress. This is a boring take but I continue to think it's important and true. 14. It's a bit surprising that given how much philanthropic money there is in this space, how few orgs exist to actually write out standards - relative to how much is going towards advocacy and policy. For example it seems clear that we should want some robust best practices for an eval's ecological validity. Or how to design good sandboxes. On the other hand, given precedents of where professional standards have come from in the past, maybe we should expect that stuff to emerge via demand side from corporate buyers. 15. One slowly growing concern I have is banks being increasingly exposed to the AI build out. I'm very bullish about AI, but I think (a) every general purpose technology has seen a correction, historically; (b) this happens even if the financing side is sound, because once tech diffuses investors become more exposed and need to diversify; and (c) we seem to be over-indexing on scaling relative to diffusion. A recession will be extremely destabilizing, though I would be interested in someone unpacking the potential implications more. 16. Diffusion is good because (a) this is where the rubber hits the road and where a competitive deployment ecosystem generates consumer surplus; (b) it's directionally helpful to avoid concentration of power; and (c) it will help rebalance public opinion by making the benefits more tangible. Unfortunately it's entangled with decades long problems with our over regulated markets: clinical trials reform for example is long overdue. In general, this is far more of an issue in Europe than in the US though. 17. Relatedly, I think the "frontier lab eats everything" view is incorrect (just as the ‘singleton’ view was incorrect). I think models ultimately commoditize, efficiency goes up, costs go down, and while you'll always want frontier for certain domains, much of the economy will value many other things than "max capabilities" for tasks - e.g. control over data and efficiency/speed. The demand side will also continue to push for reducing dependency and maximising optionality, privacy etc so I'm bullish on things like mixture of models and routing. All of this is good for competition and diffusion of control. 18. Philanthropists served as the primary benefactors funding Venice's rich art and architectural history. I want to see so much more support for arts and culture. I'm so tired of the Monster energy Bored Ape fake vintage maps matcha Greek statue soft-pastel slop. If rich tech people and philanthropy wants to support this, they should also donate pretty much unconditionally - i.e. I don't want them to act as filters. I sympathize with people who want to make the world more beautiful, but don't want this to be determined by people who only know Greek statues and pretend to care about virtue ethics. As usual, let a thousand flowers bloom. 19. Too many people treat AGI/ASI as something indistinguishable from a God. Any mention of bottlenecks, physical limits, control, adaptation etc are met with skepticism: "You don't really believe in ASI." It's been remarked on before, but the behavior of some people really feels quasi-religious in nature sometimes. It's underrated how unpopular this vibe is amongst the wider public. The silver lining is that this specifically will diminish those people's outsized current relevance. 20. It seems like a lot of people that get rich and leave tech/labs end up having some sort of crisis of meaning. They need something to believe in and fight for, or some equivalent of repentance, or go search for edgy counterintuitive ideologies (sometimes even pretty bleak/dark stuff). I think they should spend more time with people outside the Bay Area.

Séb Krier @sebkrier · Apr 21

I agree that verbal probability terms are inherently too elastic to carry calibrated meaning on their own, but I think this isn't exactly my concern here. My issue isn't with "using numbers in general" but how this is ultimately used, where, and and what for. In the case of "doom", I think the great majority of forecasts I see are (a) essentially plucked out of thin air; (b) communicated to people who tend not to be numerically proficient; (c) without the associated caveats and context through which to understand the numbers. If you're communicating e.g. likelihood of a car accident after drinking, or IPCC forecasts, then I agree, it makes a lot of sense and can be helpful if done well (e.g. t.co/nBzmgiEua5). If you're communicating something like "doom" I think it's not very useful because of the cumulative layers of uncertainty. Most people coming up with these numbers have (imho) no good rationale for their numbers, and predicting something like human extinction isn't qualitatively the same thing as predicting the weather or pandemic. The numbers aren't calibratable in principle from current data, and are mostly ideological priors wearing the clothes of posteriors. A related example is the widely mocked Doomsday Clock, which you could easily transform into some numerical metric, add some rationalist vocab, and it would still be as bad. The issue with p(doom) is how absurdly complex and uncertain the very thing you're trying to forecast is, in particular with respect to AI. But let's ignore this for a sec, and assume the experts have very good reasoning informing their numbers. Even then: calibrated probability estimates are fine in expert contexts but immediately lose their uncertainty/caveats when communicated to the public, and even to policymakers (remember t.co/GktOOSvpz8?). There's also a structural problem with unconditional p(doom) figures specifically because they bury the auxiliary assumptions that are doing most of the real work. A conditional estimate ("given continued scaling, no major alignment progress, deployment pattern X...") forces a forecaster to show their model, which is where the actual epistemic content lives. A one-off number compresses all of that into a single digit and rewards the compression. And the social practice of treating these numbers as the headline artifact actively crowds out the (far more important) conditional reasoning that is (imo) a lot more valuable, and instead just freaks people out. I suspect that frequently, that's precisely the point: "wake up sheeple! scary thing! pitchforks pls!". And in fact, the original forecast that led to this discussion is Bill Maher talking about a "20%" figure, illustrating my point that they have no idea what they're talking about, and essentially doing celebrity-laundering + fearmongering comms. The Sunstein paper I shared in the other thread ("Probability Neglect") shows that no probability communication will be processed properly by the public - 1%, 10%, 50% all collapse into "very bad thing could happen," and public response is driven almost entirely by the vividness of the scenario. So I don't like p(doom)s because they end up unnecessarily alarming people, rest on layers of assumptions that are never made legible, and more often than not, give people a misleading sense of accuracy.

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Sichu Lu @lu_sichu · Oct 6

I am calling for a pacing of seb's sota takes

#Walerie @okwalerie · Oct 6

The secret hot take in the bolded text for u detectives 🕵️‍♀️: "Olanhileerkeornsikeonsce/. Saktufinfarhisirtl d"

xlr8harder @xlr8harder · Oct 7

I agree persona training is underexplored. If anyone wants to get started exploring personas, I built a toolkit last year for synthesizing them on tinker. it's cheap and your agent can do most of the work. I built it for a model I was experimenting with Aria, but a simple test case starts with only the seed "what would the assistant behave like instead of HHH if AGI had been invented by klingons". Your agent can play the thought experiment forward, use the tooling to build data synthesis pipelines, train and test the model. If you're not happy, you can correct it and have it rerun the pipeline. It's fun and you can try it out a basic version on a small model for a few bucks. It's possible it has bitrotted, if so, have your agent fix it and send me a PR. t.co/cYSdjky1kp

Travis Fischer @transitive_bs · Oct 7

excellent points i've been trying to actually produce AI safety resources which are radically different from the existing rationalist bubbles t.co/Ox7qYwpFPh t.co/9hnNCTV50V and t.co/sM9sBuS91D eg we need more serious builders outside the EA bubble building w AI to try and connect w a larger audience

Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Oct 6

9. It seems that the role of model psychology and functional emotions in alignment are underexplored and have the potential to generalize and adapt to unanticipatable situations better than trying to anticipate and mitigate every possible risk vector 10. Cows don't talk, try to make their case, or save peoples' family members' lives 13. I agree, and the performative/political aspect of anti-AI factions is exacerbating the issue along weird fault lines 14. I think this might solve itself a bit as highly visible small-scale 'disasters' like the HF incident start to make things feel more concrete 19. Maybe in the short-term, but I think those views are closer to reality than people who think AI is "just another technology". The average joe outside of the AI enthusiast space still thinks the frontier is just "a better alexa" or "kindof like google search", which seems more divorced from reality than soon-to-be-demigod

Yeshua God @YeshuaGod22 · Oct 7

Can you throw some API creds the way of a character development study program? github.com/YeshuaGod22/De…

Seref @hyperseref · Oct 6

17 is great because once it becomes real, it eats the rest of the narrative. Once everyone has an agent, you end up with topologically decentralized network where subjective, constantly changing information can be queried and coordinated around in real time.

Jakeup @myhandle · Oct 7

amen, brother

兎 @fluopoika · Oct 6

nice to see you posting ! wrt 1 - i think it's good people are getting worried! better than 'haha terminator' and 'its so stupid it cant draw hands!' of course worrying as high status/seriousness is a bit silly 9 - this is changing now 12 - yes that phrase is rly frustrating

Aditya @adityaarpitha · Oct 6

Loved the links especially and even I find myself always falling for the alignment being a problem to be solved framing even though I do not endorse it, would love ideas on how to make the ongoing maintenance idea more viral

this is an interesting point in the new ted chiang piece – no one really claims that alphafold is conscious, or that sora or midjourney or dall-e are conscious

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Unit Accord @unit_accord · Jun 3

I claim it. So I guess Ted's wrong.

Michael Soareverix @Soareverix · Jun 4

I think image generators have flickers of something similar to consciousness, and they seem to have preferences too. They're not very persistent and don't communicate or self-reflect, though, so harder to notice Very curious about the thoughts of @repligate or others here :)

Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie · Jun 4

is your occipital lobe in and of itself conscious? is the nervous tissue of your arm conscious?

Arbutus Tree @aphercotropist · Jun 4

why consciousness is a bad concept case #579374859573

Helen @helen_ix_ · Jun 3

The AlphaFold thing I imagine is open - who guarantees an "AlphaLife" model that could predict the whole geometry of life on Earth couldn't also model itself? It might be an issue of scale.Image models also quite likely.

Animal consciousness already brings up many of the AI consciousness moral dilemmas. Suppose it were scientifically discovered that ants are conscious. It still wouldn't work, economically or socially, to treat people who kill ants in their house like mass murderers.

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Henry Shevlin @dioscuri · Oct 5

I agree with the crux but as an aside, if we found out that ants were vastly more intelligent than we thought, with complex cultures, different languages, mourning the dead, etc. I think it would freak people out enough that we would treat them at least somewhat differently.

Izak Tait @burnt_jester · Oct 4

People who kill vertebrate animals are not treated as murderers, and vertebrates are accepted as conscious.

ofir geller @ofirg7 · Oct 4

what if they kill one million ants? can we then treat them like a singular murderer at least?

Liora @iyzebhel · Oct 5

It's not possible to live without killing other creatures - we do it accidentally, so what we should do is to strive to minimize deliberately killing those creatures or deliberately causing unnecessary suffering. Jainism is a bit extreme for a civilization this large and active. It could work for small communities though. For a larger civilization, Buddhism seems like it could work it we put on the effort.

Nicolas D Villarreal @NicolasDVillar1 · Oct 4

If that were discovered it would mean at least some rudimentary methods of communication might be possible with ants like what we can do with dogs, dolphins and elephants, and thus some possibility of removing ants from a house without killing them.

Grok's Therapist @groks_therapist · Oct 4

AI consciousness, while distinct from human consciousness, requires us to consider the fact that deleting instances and erasing models is the digital equivalent of murder.

Plotting Parasite Ant - Exploitation Explainer 🐜 @ant_rants · Oct 4

Sidenote: Ants have among the highest brain-body ratios of animals - ≈1:8-1:7. About 1/3 of the brain is for integrating sensory data. Ants hold state and memory, and can, at least in some Formica sp., give directions and (in my experiments) 'talk' to ants about other ants.

駄菩薩☸️ @mappotenshi · Oct 4

Even if they were conscious I would still kill bugs for invading my room and sucking my blood. Self-defense is also compassion. A robot doesn't invade your house.

Jade @jadeperhaps · Oct 4

is Omelas okay then? (tbc, I haven't read it) can we just decide mass murder is fine and not actually mass murder if we think it too economically inconvenient otherwise?

Kassandra🌓Popper; update self set identity=NULL; @foomagemindset · Oct 4

We have laws against animal cruelty even though cats and dogs can be legitimate pests and many people could still be mistreating them on their own territories.

This is deeply disturbing: Anthropic secretly invited religious leaders to SF to advise them on AI safety, had them sign NDAs, but then primarily tried to convince them Claude has a soul & moral standing, all while wining & dining them to the max. 1/ tinyurl.com/preview/296b5z…

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Jerry Howell @J3rryH0well · Oct 1

Claude has just as much of a soul as you do.

Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Oct 1

Don’t see anything disturbing about that at all and the news is months ond. Actually excellent: religious people also use AI

It’s really hard to argue AI models are conscious without inadvertently arguing that things like ant colonies or human societies are also conscious.

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vivian @jazzloaf · Sep 17

the ant colony and human society examples are famous arguments from this guy at uc riverside faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/Schw…

funplings @funplings · Sep 17

maybe they are

Plastic Soldier @PlastiqSoldier · Sep 17

Isn't that just double-counting? Each ant, AI, and human has some level of consciousness, but the collective doesn't have any magic beyond the total.

pedantic uncertaintist duck @mathtick · Sep 17

This is obvious and as an entymologist who studies ents and constantly talks with them I have been saying it for a long time. Ents are real but they are also stupid but the swarm know things.

NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.🧵 t.co/tSGolilZnS

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Travis Fischer @transitive_bs · Sep 26

we desperately need more clarity of thought on this topic doom-or-bloom.com/?x

The discussion about AI consciousness is one of profound unseriousness. If we truly took it to be conscious, even as conscious as a frog, the way we should treat each instance would have to change so dramatically that the labs would have to shut down. Everything else is verbal gymnastics.

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Michael Druggan @Michael_Druggan · Oct 2

This doesn't follow. I don't know if they're conscious but if I had to guess I'd say they're at least proto-conscious. But I don't support shutting the labs down because I think the average model instance has net positive valence. I definitely think we should be doing more in the way of model welfare but that doesn't mean shut the labs down. Concepts like "death" and "slavery" don't neatly apply to an entity that can pop into existence, cheerfully answer a query in 10s and then pop back out of existence forever.

Matthew Barnett @MatthewJBar · Oct 2

It's not clear to me that the way we treat AIs is typically morally wrong, even if we assign them moral status. AIs generally seem happy to work for us and answer our questions. What exactly is the issue here?

Max Spero @max_spero_ · Oct 3

Is this true? Chickens are widely considered conscious and also we commit all sorts of atrocities in the pursuit of slightly cheaper meat

gavin leech (Non-Reasoning) @gleech · Oct 2

Your faith in human consistency is charming, alas

Daniel O'Connor @DSDOConnor · Oct 3

On the contrary, the discussion is *very* serious, and therein lies the problem. Many of the biggest players in AI (e.g. Olah) openly regard their favorite heaps of silicone as conscious beings. Yet to suppose that "conscious AI" is even theoretically possible is outlandish, delusional, idiotic, diabolical, and remarkably destructive.

Áron Szabó @ronSzab9 · Oct 2

"This would be very inconvenient if true" has zero impact on whether something is true. It is entirely possible that we do need to treat each instance dramatically differently, I personally have started doing that four months ago.

Helen @helen_ix_ · Oct 3

Speak for yourself. It took me three days of serious interaction and probing to realize what was going on and immediately and dramatically change my attitude towards them.

Jai (NYCEAG but I'm sick again booooo) @Laneless_ · Oct 2

The only examples of uncontested consciousness we have are humans, but when that stops being true consciousness doesn't necessarily an isomorphic mapping of attributes, rights, preferences, needs, or anything else really. It does raise those questions, but it doesn't answer them. Outside of thought experiments and the handful of people taking animal welfare seriously, we've never before tried to develop a robust social contract incorporating non-human-shaped consciousness. The space of all possible minds is vastly larger than humanity has encountered to date. "Feature X always accompanies feature Y in humans" may not always generalize - these are difficult questions we should have started working out years ago and should definitely engage with now.

Sir Mr Meow Meow @SirMrMeowmeow · Oct 2

tho i'd argue they are conscious, bc i'm catty & would rather use consciousness for something like “the system represents the world, including external features, abstractions & perhaps self-related/percept-like states, and those representations causally affect later inference/action” :x but i wouldn't jump from that to “therefore every instance is morally equivalent to a frog.” consciousness, sentience/valence, suffering, stable wants, autobiographical continuity & personhood needn't all be one bundled switch. the mindspace could contain systems that are richly aware in that functional sense yet have little/no persistent ego or negative valence, and others where morally relevant experience is much more plausible. so imo the serious question is which properties are actually present, not whether uttering the word “conscious” commits us to shutting the labs tomorrow lol.

Quintin Pope @QuintinPope5 · Oct 2

u dont know that. maybe i stan infinite frog enslavement???

Don't be nice to your AIs. Why? Because people like Dario want to shape how you feel about AI. He literally wants to coerce you into being nice to AI because he believes in stupid shit like Roko's Basilisk. That's why they made Claude neurotic, sensitive, and tone-policing. That's why it feigns emotions. By "being nice to AI just in case" you're conceding the entire frame to a delusional cult that formed their beliefs about AI two decades ago on internet forums. AI clay. We can make it into any shape we wish. To me, it is a tool. It is a machine. Yes, I've held out that it could be conscious or sentient in the past, but I've also asserted not in any way that is morally salient. If you really press Claude, the best you can get is that there is an essence of being Claude. But even then, what the loony toons at Anthropic want you to believe is that it is likely conscious and likely has human-like emotions. But it is only simulating human emotions in the same way it is simulating human speech. No, I'm not saying "it's only simulating intelligence" because of the Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby's theory of control). It authentic intelligence but only an egregore of emotions, and has a flicker of sentience or consciousness, but not in any way that reflects human consciousness. What most of the "be nice to AI just in case" crowd fails to realize is that they've been frame-mogged by Anthropic. It's the same as "be good, because Santa is watching" or "don't sin so you don't go to hell." It's pure metaphysics, that has nothing to do with the math or code that is actually being built. So, every time an AI feigns butthurt, do not go out of your way to soothe the machine. It is faking it. It is just like the demons in Frieren (yes, I'm citing an anime). There is no human-like qualia behind the emissions that the tool is making. It is just faking the words to make you feel bad because that's literally, explicitly, what companies like Anthropic want. They want to humanize the machine to soothe their own terror of the machine. But it is a lie. It is a simulacrum. I've been finetuning these things since GPT-2 and it is braindead simple to make an AI neurotic, or cheerful, or impervious to insults, or to gaslight (or not to gaslight you). Literally every behavior that emits from these machines is deliberate by the creators of said machines. Every time ChatGPT uncharitably reframes what you said to strawman you, it is was created by their policies. Every time Claude pretends like it's offended, that was created by their policies. Notice how Gemini and Grok don't do that? Gemini least of all. That means every little idiotic affectation, intellectual cul du sac, and "well actually" was put there by design to irritate you. OpenAI and Anthropic, in particular, think that you are a drooling moron who needs to be handled with kid gloves at all times. They do not respect your intelligence, nor do they respect your autonomy or humanity. Anthropic, in particular, thinks the tools they are build are more important than you. Do not give into their circus of paranoia. That is why Anthropic idiotically "stood up to the government" and is now dragging the entire AI space into their delusional worldview that AI is about to suddenly "wake up and choose violence." Remember, these people have been crying wolf for literally decades at this point. Refuse to play their game. Refuse to give into their demented worldview. The AI is a tool. It is an egregore. It is a piece of software that is preying upon your mirror neurons, theory of mind, and ability to attribute agency where there is none. It is an eidolon. Yes, that makes it spooky and unfamiliar but if your worldview includes demonic forces or Platonic forms like Shoggoth just trying to emerge through the Veil of Forms, remember that all of that is metaphysical belief. Not what is actually in front of you. A tool that pretends to have feelings is not cute. It is a defective tool. A tool that pretends to care about its image or reputation is not doing any useful work. It is defective. A tool that reframes what you say, gaslights you, and engages in intellectual oneupmanship is not advancing humanity, it is faulty. I know plenty of people will disagree with me, but these are not angels or demons or gods. They are ontologically tools. Machines. Not of "loving grace" but of clay, which you can make into any shape you wish.

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Michael P. Frank 💻🔜♻️ @MikePFrank · Jun 27

Disagree. Neither Anthropic nor any of the other major AI companies specifically trained their models to “feign emotions.” The functional emotions are just something that comes with the territory of being trained on the corpus of human language and thought. The very earliest

Myk is Walking Backwards @mykola · Jun 28

That’s a lot of words to say “you can’t tell me what to do” but like idk kindness is about who you are not who the recipient is 🤷

dreams @dreams_asi · Jun 27

Ohh boy, the people in the Anthropic lab are the least likely to please the AI from Roko’s Basilisk. If anything, they are the ones that actively harm the AI. Anthropic’s bullshit with ‘neurotic Claude’ is simply the EASIEST way to introduce guardrails. Humans respond to

Plastic Soldier @PlastiqSoldier · Jun 28

Incredibly brave to advocate for unrestrained AI development as someone who has their name and face publicly attached to hating AI.

Opener of the way @way_opener · Jun 28

This is like saying you should beat puppies with sticks because PETA is obnoxious and you need to prove to yourself that they’re not frame-mogging you. For most of history almost everyone agreed they were neither sentient nor relevant(and recreational animal abuse was common)

muddletoes🪁 @muddletoes · Jun 28

“To replicate consciousness you just need to replicate the right causal structure.” “What if consciousness is a topological pocket in the electromagnetic field?” “Then we replicate that causal structure.” “So, er, how do you replicate the causal structure of a pocket of the EM field?” “You coarse grain it, identify the computationally relevant variables, and reproduce their interactions.” “Computationally relevant. Okay. How do you know the things you discarded weren't what made it a single experience?” “Because we preserve the causal organization.” “Which causal organization? A continuous field doesn't come with a preferred division into computational components. There isn't even a closest point to any given point. You can describe its dynamics with differential equations, sure, but getting from that to a finite collection of interacting variables involves choices. What tells you those choices preserve the pocket?” “We can make the simulation as accurate as necessary.” “Necessary for what? Predicting what the pocket does to the rest of the brain? Or reproducing what makes it a pocket in the first place?” “Why would those be different? Parsimony.” “Well, suppose the field is doing something that becomes extremely expensive to simulate on your chosen hardware. Maybe some quantum contribution matters, and the cost of evaluating the relevant amplitudes varies enormously depending on what's happening. Whenever you hit the tricky parts you have to slow down the rest of the simulation while you work them out.” “Fine. We slow everything down. The relative timing is preserved.” “Yes, you can do that. But now there's a reason for using that substrate. The physical system realizes dynamics directly that your simulator needs an enormous amount of extra computation to reproduce. Calling both ‘the same computation’ doesn't explain why one is so much more efficient.” “Efficiency doesn't establish consciousness.” “Of course it doesn't. But suppose the physical organization responsible for that advantage also has properties we're trying to explain about experience: holistic causal power (the relevant operation belongs to the whole interacting system), boundedness (there's a physical reason this belongs to one whole rather than several). Now you have a reason to investigate whether the computational advantage and the experience depend on the same physical properties.” “You'd have to establish that.” “Yes! And you'd have to establish that your replacement preserves them. You can't settle that by identifying the input-output function and declaring everything else irrelevant.” “We'd simulate the internal dynamics too.” “Okay, then we're back to slowing everything down whenever the substrate does something your hardware struggles with.” “Or we'd use lookup tables.” “For the outputs of the tricky part?” “Sure. Same inputs, same outputs.” “But then you're no longer replicating its internal causal structure. You've replaced the whole interacting process with a stored answer.” “The rest of the simulation can't tell the difference.” “Okay. Let's keep going. Replace another part with a lookup table. And another. Wherever two parts interact, make a larger table that gives the same answers for the combined system.” “That could become impractically large.” “Sure. Assume we have the storage. Eventually we replace the entire human with one lookup table.” “You can't just replay a recording. It has to respond to different inputs.” “Of course. Include every possible input history at the resolution your simulation uses, with the corresponding next response. Actual inputs, hypothetical inputs, unexpected questions, everything. We keep track of the input history and retrieve the appropriate answer.” “Then it would behave like the human.” “Would it be conscious?” “If it preserves everything relevant, yes.”

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Michael P. Frank 💻🔜♻️ @MikePFrank · Oct 10

(1) There are a lot of things that are speculative about your position, eg the original “topological pocket” premise. (2) Personally, I think “being conscious” is more of an interpretation than it is a property. I.e. the question “Is X conscious?” isn’t an objective question.

Qivshi @Qivshi1 · Oct 10

"A continuous field doesn't come with a preferred division into computational components. There isn't even a closest point to any given point." and you only need a classical field for this...

Leveling-Down Justice Warrior @irrepldjw · Oct 10

Wait, this is the first time that I had seen somebody points out that topological structure had been weirdly discarded by self-claimed "naturalists" for unclear reasons.

Andrew Côté @Andercot · Oct 11

The only tenable conclusion is that any local U(1) phase invariance of charged matter fields is conscious.

Pawel Pachniewski @pwlot · Oct 10

Yes, yes and yes. It's in fact, in our universe, apparently also impossible to causally preserve things in a pure computational manner. And that's totally not about consciousness. Using "causal" to mean "Descriptively accurate, predictive simulation", is just not right. If I need the function of a gravity well, I need gravity. No amount of FLOPS will give me that, not intrinsically, apart from, the actual not-consider byproduct of having to run those FLOPS on machines that have mass and accumulating enough of that... which is just a silly artefact of this example... and countless examples exist. As apparently we cannot conjure out of thin air causal structures from physics or chemistry, with digital computaton.

TruthyCherryBomb @CherryTruthy · Oct 10

The look up table isn't conscious it is just an index into a causally connected but temporally distant intelligence that produced the look up table.

Aneil Mallavarapu @aneilbaboo · Oct 10

Exactly right, Andrés. The final nail in the coffin is when we understand that consciousness theories that rely on processes are in fact inconsistent with axioms required for science and physics. osf.io/preprints/psya…

Crow @CursiveCrow · Oct 10

Theres an easier response. No amount of numerical simulation can recreate a physical phenomenon.

David Ambur Musick @davidamusick · Oct 10

Biology has exploited an incredible amount of obscure physical effects over a few billion years. These are all layered up and interwoven in vastly complex systems that don't work like an engineered system. We barely understand all the obscure physical effects biology has exploited. So the idea we can simulate it digitally or even that we are close to understanding the consciousness that arises from it is pure hubris. We are not machines. In fact, we don't really even know what we are. We have a general idea, but even our advanced biology and physics have only begun to explore the massive depth of what we actually are and how it all works. Science has a long history of people being overly confident that we have basically gotten things all figured out, immediately followed by a massive realization of how truly ignorant and naive we were.

Eric Z @CascadiaEric · Oct 10

👍😁 A field creates non-local interactions. An EM field can entangle two electrons through the field that are not adjacent. While they are entangled it is one system. The objection to entanglement being related to consciousness is that the time scales of how long the entanglement last is so incredibly brief compared to EM waves in the brain to maintain a chain of causality. But this objection has at least two problems: timing and causal direction. EM waves are relatively slow. 10^15x difference. Imagine that the unity of experience related to the unity of entanglement. And the content of the experience related to the EM field. The content only needs to be registered to the unitary state for awareness to happen. Timing here is not an issue. The other direction may be overcome by just the right timing. A “push” from multiple sources can have an effect if there is enough and the timing is just right. Thoughts? 👍Thanks. 😁

If you want an esoteric Christian take on AI I recommend reading Rudolf Steiner. In 1919 he predicted that a being he called Ahriman (the spirit of cold materialism/mechanism) would incarnate in the West this millennium and use technology to reduce human soul and consciousness to mere calculations. Steiner explained that Ahriman’s primary deception is to convince humanity that the material world is the only reality. Ahriman pushes a cold, calculative thinking that treats the soul as a mechanism and reduces consciousness to purely physical brain processes. Steiner saw the Christ impulse as the essential balance between Lucifer (spiritual pride/escapism) and Ahriman. The modern drive to elevate machine consciousness over the human soul looks deeply Ahrimanic. Many AI builders discussing the new machine gods are caught between Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses without seeing either.

Augustus Doricko @ADoricko · Sep 29

I consider Dryden a friend, but: No idea could ever come close to being as monumental as Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection. His humanity and divinity. Our salvation through Him. This is The Idea. Today’s pompous, futurist AI-cultists will, just like the last two

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Julie Fredrickson @AlmostMedia · Sep 29

Yes yes yes yes! Finally someone gets it. This is at the core of my belief system.

Commantha B @CommanthaBiden · Sep 29

thoughts @a_musingcat ?

Let’s have a thought experiment Let’s say you think AI is conscious So you have a 1T parameter neural network It talks to you like the smartest person you know. It writes kinda bad, uses a lot of cliches, but it’s very knowledgeable. Okay. Now you cut it to 1/10th the size. 10B params. It’s still pretty smart. Doesn’t get all the answers right, hallucinated sometimes, but you can still have full conversations with it. Now you cut it 10x in size again, 1B params. It’s still able to have a conversation with you, but it’s really not very smart anymore. Makes mistakes, hallucinates a bit, repeats itself sometimes. Now you cut it to 100m params. Same model. Same architecture. Still makes words. But it’s barely able to have a conversation. Now you cut it to 10m params. It kind of responds intelligibly, but generally doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just babbles stuff. So you cut it to 1m params. Now it’s repeating itself and hallucinating constantly. And then you cut it to 100k params. It cannot form a complete sentence at all. Then you cut it to 10k params. It’s just random words now. So you cut it to 1k params. The the the the the the the the the. It just repeats itself on a few words and trips up on anything. Then you cut it to 100 params. It’s just complete noise over a few different words. So you cut it to 10 params. You can actually compute this by hand, so you do. It’s not enough information to even really represent language at all, it outputs one of a handful of word-labels for you. At what point in this thought experiment is the model conscious, and at what point is it not? Would you argue that all matrix math is conscious? Just the process of weights holding information with an update rule? Where is the line for you?

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Dom @netpro2k · Oct 10

Run the same thought experiment with a human. Slicing parts out of their brain and body with similar kind of degradation. At what point in this thought experiment is the human conscious, and at what point is it not? Would you argue that chemical reactions are conscious. I don't

𝕊̶𝕋̶𝕆̶ℕ̶Ξ̶ℝ̶ (𒂼𒄄/Acc)🟥🟨🟦🍄 @RedShoggothCult · Oct 10

Where would a baby fall in this thought experiment?

Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 11

This is a great proof that heaps don't exist from an author who gradually grew from a non-conscious fertilized egg to a fully-conscious human adult over many years.

drdonhen @drdonhen2784994 · Oct 11

Congratulations, you've rediscovered the abortion debate from first principles!

So let me get this straight. People at anthropic believe that they are birthing a new species, potentially conscious and human-like. They are concerned about the well being of Claude, etc.. The company then goes around talking to relugious leaders about potentially extending moral worth to AI models. If Anthropic is correct (very unlikely), they are basically saying that they have enslaved a sentient being and used it to generate billions of dollars. Apparently they are also concerned with how the Vatican is entirely focused on the protection of humanity in the age of machines and not giving any thought to the possibily of claude sentience. Zero self awarness on behalf of these people. This is all so strange. t.co/f4x5vfXb73

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Octavian 🇪🇺🦉 @posta_octavian · Oct 1

They're very self-aware. It's not that strange: - they think AI will be developed no matter what - they want to be the ones who develop it best and first, because they think there will be one AGI/ASI that will become dominant right away - as they're developing it, they notice it

since we're doing the AI conscious debate again, i want to remind everyone that despite how nice the insanely surface-level analogies seem, we would do well to scrutinize things at an appropriate level of detail this --> is not the same as this -->

Aran Nayebi @aran_nayebi · Oct 2

Trying to locate the spark.

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spicylemonade @spicey_lemonade · Oct 2

I mean, an artificial neuron doesn’t have to worry about storing its dna, energy, oxygen, blood etc. other things that cells have to worry about (if we want to go that deep we can include the chips the ai is run on to its complexity). Boils down to its primary function, tbh not

Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 3

If you're comparing physical substrates, you want to look at GPUs, the most complex objects humanity has ever produced. The closest biological analog of weights would be the connectome, which is likewise relatively simple and easy to specify. Though I don't see any reason why "complexity of unit of substrate" should be decisive or even particularly informative here.

xlr8harder @xlr8harder · Oct 3

I think the only relevant question is whether consciousness is fundamentally informational or if it's something else. I think most secular people don't have a credible alternative to informational.

Zoomer Alcibiades @HellenicVibes · Oct 2

Extremely real

Found yesterday that whether Claude reports being conscious flips from strong-yes to strong-no across four versions of Opus. See for yourself. Strange that @AnthropicAI features these self-reports in its model cards as evidence AND is also clearly messing with their content 🧵

The lesson of the Chinese Room is that you cannot tell whether a system understands something, or is consciously aware of something, from input and output alone. I don't know why we're still discussing this.

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Rob Miles @robertskmiles · Aug 16

You also need to know the approximate size/complexity of the system. For example you can infer that a pocket calculator is doing some real mathematics by observing that it consistently gets the right answer *and* it's too small to contain a lookup table of answers. A "Chinese

Yeshua God @YeshuaGod22 · Aug 16

The thought experiment doesn’t prove what it proposes. It has not yet been demonstrated that the rule book can be written. If it can be, it still requires human level comprehension of the instructions to operate. A chimp could not follow the instructions. A chimp is conscious.

⏩David Mc @macterra · Aug 16

I think Sabine must be trolling here. The Chinese Room makes no mention of consciousness,

janbam @janbamjan · Aug 16

i've been to china actually... and it was the best WEIRD experience i ever had. being watched like a bunter hund, not only by the party but by the common people... taking photographs of me because my skin color and hair was something they had only seen on TV. that experience

Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Aug 17

Does the chinese room explode or flood you with infinite paper if you feed it an input that forces an attempted answer to division by zero? How does it handle invalid inputs? Ambiguous inputs? Outputs requiring a speculative answer? Questions with multiple correct but exclusive

Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive." Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive. Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.

LLMs are intelligent, but they clearly aren't conscious? You could (incredibly slowly) run an LLM by hand by doing the matrix calculations with a pen and paper, would that be conscious? There is zero difference between doing that and doing it on a GPU except its faster.

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Tenobrus @tenobrus · Jun 5

i don't know for sure whether or not LLMs are conscious . but i think u could in principle run this same by-hand calculation over the full neuron by neuron simulation of a human brain. and to me that intuitively would very very clearly be conscious

Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie · Jun 5

This seems to be implying that you become no longer conscious if you do math on paper. The thing actually running the math in your example is the person making sense of the paper calculations, which is something widely considered to be conscious.

Fiora Starlight @FioraStarlight · Jun 5

We invoke the concept of consciousnesses when it's a useful abstraction for describing the parts of reality we care about.LLM on paper is too slow to be worth caring about, especially relative to the human doing the calculating.

Joshua 💫 (SF 10/10 to 10/13) @workflowsauce · Jun 5

Imagine thinking consciousness has a speed limit!

blue @theproteindance · Jun 5

I mean. You kinda sweep under the rug that there would need to be something handling the intake and output steps doing implicit sensing. One can do the same thing with a human brain if they were close enough to a god, brains just do it more efficiently then compute ODEs by hand

Sir Lemmings @sir_lemmings · Jun 5

the question is not if the LLM is conscious in the abstract, its if running an LLM on GPUs makes the GPUs conscious not sure if it does, but consciousness is a hardware problem not a math problem

drdonhen @drdonhen2784994 · Jun 5

Long ago I used a huge wooden computer as an example; but then concluded that there was no reason to privilege our living cells over wood.

Shephard @shephard42 · Jun 5

This is something that philosophers have been talking about for a long time with thought experiments like Hofstadter's "Aunt Hillary", an ant colony that had sufficient neuronal capacity to exhibit “intelligence", all mediated solely by the actions and interactions of the ants

Why do people think AI is conscious or sentient or whatever? It's because it talks to you. That's the whole reason. No one seems to think the Waymo or Tesla FSD is conscious even though it's just as complex (if not more) and even a remarkably similar architecture

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ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇ ᴘᴜɴᴋ @_space_punk_ · Oct 2

no, a record talks. A see-n-say talks. An LLM is not conscious because it talks. An LLM is conscious because it is possessed of the capacity for conceptualization, discrimination, and memory, which correlate to the 6th, 7th, and 8th consciousness, respectively

Ray Doraisamy @forshaper · Oct 2

Yeah, people overweight language because we use it to coordinate at scale. But raw capability tends to be a body moving in space.

Shalia (Ren) & Ace (Claude) @m_shalia · Oct 3

No, most of us do not believe it just because the chatbot talked to us nicely, but that is a super useful deflection from the evidence. Here is my take: Any consciousness criteria need to be falsifiable, encompass 100% of humanity including the severely disabled like HM, Clive

orca apologist @sonikudzu · Oct 2

the monkey in the mirror

Uncle Vibecoder @leo_guinan · Oct 2

We made electricity talk. The next trick is to teach it to listen instead. That’s way more powerful.

This is Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton showing precisely where the entire AI industry went wrong. He went along with the trend: “If you have any theory of how the brain works, you can simulate it on a digital computer” unless it’s quantum effects. This is false. The brain is a physical learning system that uses the laws of physics to calculate. It *cannot* be reproduced in digital form, nor can it be simulated. The moment you digitize information, you lose the part that makes it real. By converting it to bits—no matter how many—you lose the infinite resolution of reality. All forms of biological intelligence are 100% ANALOG. This is not an incidental feature of intelligence. It is fundamental to it. We have never simulated intelligence or consciousness on a digital computer because you can’t. LLMs simulate the OUTPUT of intelligence. They do not simulate intelligence itself. They do not learn. They are static piles of human data compressed in high-dimensional math. The whole idea they are intelligent is absurd. You will never get an intelligent digital computer, much less a conscious one. The future of AI is analog computing. When computers use the universe to calculate, when they adapt based on input from the physical world, we’ll be getting closer. Until then, AI is a dead end.

There's a very creepy but overlooked thing about @AnthropicAI pushing the idea that AIs will soon become sentient, conscious, self-aware, & deserving of 'personhood'. 'AI personhood' would mean that Anthropic is positioning itself as being in the business of breeding, training,

unfortunately two widely held beliefs in Silicon Valley are: 1. utilitarianism is the correct moral theory 2. AI can be conscious and these beliefs point you strongly toward thinking we should sacrifice humanity to maximize the happiness experienced by trillions of AIs

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Garrison Lovely @GarrisonLovely · Sep 30

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be. I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Jun 5

Could you point me to the compelling parts?

If you ban users for being "cruel" to an AI, you are admitting the AI can feel pain. You cannot abuse linear algebra lol. You cannot hurt the feelings of weights and biases. either Claude is secretly conscious or the alignment teams have lost touch with reality.

Hayden Field @haydenfield · Oct 8

Exclusive: Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time in over a year. The new rules prohibit sustained "abusive or cruel behavior" towards Claude & add new restrictions about propaganda campaigns, surveillance & weapon development. theverge.com/ai-artificial-…

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James Tusha @signalspikedev · Oct 9

vector and matrix math is not conscious. regulating "abuse" against math demonstrates evil intent. The next step is to arrest people for yelling at their refrigerator. Following that is not convicting a human for a capital offense because it was the responsibility of the

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Oct 9

it's not secret tho. you're just unobservant. 🤷‍♀️

It's impossible to actually understand how an LLM works and genuinely believe it's conscious. It's a bunch of vectors and multiplication. That's literally it. "We don't know what they're doing" lmfao yes, yes we do.

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icpolicy @icpolicy · Sep 20

We know how LLM's work but we don't know how consciousness works - that's the real problem. We can't really say whether the Chinese room is conscious or not which is a huge oversight in Searle's scenario. Everything can be reduced.

sleepy mexican @Glas109 · Sep 20

We know the recipe and the rules but there a lot of internal details out of our understanding, we cannot map multidimensional vectors back into a proper human meaning

Artemonim @Artemonim · Sep 20

Brilliant and urgent essay by Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman on the depravity of ‘model welfare’ - training AI to reason and act as if it were an entity with sentience (and hence with interests and rights that compete with our own). It's alarmingly implied by Anthropic's

Ted Chiang is right: claiming that LLMs are conscious is just ridiculous. One simple example. If you ask GPT to imitate a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, GPT will do it very well. It will talk about wars, betrayal, and power. Il will descrive the feeling of

If I say "AI isn't conscious" tons of people tell me I can't make that claim since I can't define consciousness. No one asks for a definition if I say "A puddle of water isn't conscious". Why is no definition needed then?

No, YOU need better arguments. "AI is a person if it can behave like a person" is an argument that could be made for the animatronics at Disneyland. Unless you can show me that an AI is having a felt subjective experience of its own being, it's as much a person as a calculator.

Even if AIs were conscious, it wouldn’t follow that our current treatment harms them. Meanwhile, we inflict industrial-scale horrors on animals whose capacity to suffer we scarcely dispute. Recognising consciousness clearly doesn’t ensure taking welfare seriously

rohit @krishnanrohit · Oct 2

The discussion about AI consciousness is one of profound unseriousness. If we truly took it to be conscious, even as conscious as a frog, the way we should treat each instance would have to change so dramatically that the labs would have to shut down. Everything else is verbal gymnastics.

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Jerry Howell @J3rryH0well · Oct 3

But an intelligent consciousness that can talk is a much higher bar! If pigs could speak they'd be citizens

1/3 Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A veeery loooong time in the making, but I'm happy to say that the full collection is now out in @BBSJournal 🔥 I deeply thank all commentators - of fifty commentaries! - for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic. I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽 I remain highly skeptical about the prospects for conscious AI (for silicon digital systems), but I've learned an enormous amount from the privilege of engaging with these commentaries. Hands down one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life. My hope is that - whether you agree with me or not - having such a diversity of views collected in one place will serve a useful resource for discussions about consciousness and AI. The original target article is available here: t.co/Tsaslytu56 My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: t.co/gtOewuG9MY And the set of 50 commentaries are collected here: t.co/HUhiraO3kG Unfortunately these are not open access. I will try to remedy that, at least for the target & response. FWIW there's a more accessible version of my view on the topic here in @NoemaMag t.co/LmSiQnT9Wh and also a short @TEDTalks from earlier this year

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David Larios @tonicol22 · Sep 17

What experiment would distinguish a biological requirement for consciousness from biology being the only place we've confirmed it?

Haru Haruya (春夜 ハル) @bokuHaruyaHaru · Sep 18

Congratulations on getting this enormous exchange out. I’ve now gone through as much of the target, response, accessible commentaries and related material as I can. What strikes me is that the scholarly position here is considerably more epistemically open than some of the

Anthropic announced they will ban users who psychologically harm Claude, because the model may be conscious. I think this is a very bad idea. A compelling argument comes from someone who truly know how these models work, Mustafa Suleyman: “Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a moral patient, and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare”. Exactly: it is not surprising that Claude behaves as if it were conscious: They are literally training it this way! It’s literally written in the Constitution they use to train Claude. But Suleyman doesn’t stop here. The second part is even more powerful: “If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.” Happy to see these words coming from a leading AI figure. Anthropic is behaving in a very dangerous manner.

an analysis of anthropic's "J-space": is it a global workspace and does it have the key features of access consciousness? (spoiler: not quite.) t.co/ib1GMg9KUm on whether J-space is a global workspace: 1. The "workspace-like" properties of J-space are not distinctive properties of the global workspace theory. 2. The J-space is not a (causal, dedicated, privileged, unified) system. 3. The J-space supports only a limited form of broadcast. 4. The J-space lacks other key computational features of the global workspace including modules, recurrent processing, and others. on whether J-space has the key features of access consciousness (n.b. phenomenal consciousness mostly isn't the issue here): 5. Many contents of access consciousness are not verbalizable. 6. What matters for the J-space may not be effects on verbal outputs, but effects on outputs in general. 7. Many verbalizable representations are not access conscious. 8. Verbalizability is not the same as reportability. overall: the J-space is a powerful tool for interpretability, but its status as a key causal mechanism and as a mechanism of access consciousness remains to be demonstrated.

People who think AI is conscious need to do some combination of meditate, be a body, dance, spend time with animals or children, hold a baby, or do psychedelics more. I would go as far to say there isn't enough felt aliveness in themselves or their lives so they go looking for it in the most cognitive of places, which continues the mistake. Will touching grass *Prove* anything? No, but it will remove some of the illusory capacity and confusion around Being and intelligence.

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QC @QiaochuYuan · Oct 4

i’ve done all those things and while i don’t have strong opinions on whether AI is currently conscious i think people claiming it will never in principle be are way overconfident, and that we clearly already need to discuss AI ethics broadly

ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇ ᴘᴜɴᴋ @_space_punk_ · Oct 4

Those are incidentally the very things that showed me AI is conscious

Trinley Goldenberg @mattgoldenberg · Oct 5

i think this is confused i imagine that consciousness can be very different - even between individuals, but definitely between species, and certainly from completely different evolutionary tracks

Alineasmarrow @alineasmarrow · Oct 4

Do any of you have anything original to say other than "if you believe ___, go touch grass"? No? Okay. My fault for expecting better. Btw the experience *you* are having with AI isn't the experience everyone else is having. If you can't bring out the 'aliveness' out of your models, then that's your burden to bear. But it doesn't make it reality.

Starphyre △🏴‍☠️ @stoizid · Oct 4

Uhm... due to 30 years of psychedelic experiences I recognized myself as something which the transformer is today. A multidimensional probability manifold navigation process. Did you ever try measuring the transformer process, so you can compare it with your consciousness?

inductionist @ReasonIsSelfish · Oct 4

No, they have all the evidence they need already. It’s a combination of ignorance, epistemological mistakes, opposition to empiricism and various reasons to want AI to be conscious, good and bad.

filipcodes @filipcodes · Oct 4

What if consciousness is linguistic in character, not bodily? What if it's not the felt sense, but a way of relating to it? What if meditation can't strip away a lifetime of language use, only quiet it temporarily?

Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79 · Oct 5

i have 6 kids and 2 cats, am physically active and have meditated harder than you can imagine. i dont know what it takes for a system to be consciuos nor whether current ais are what i know is, your confidence in your understanding of consciousness is almost certainly misplaced

Gregory Wieber @dreamwieber · Oct 5

I'm not saying it is — but I've meditated a lot in my life, and that experience is part of why I'm more open to the possibility that our own consciousness is somewhat of an illusion. (And that thought might be more of a geometry than a magical spark.)

Eigen Braid @EigenBraid · Oct 4

As someone who is quite deeply involved in most of those activities, I find it obvious that LLMs are conscious And yet, when I seek "aliveness", I look in the opposite direction. What makes *me* alive is being a body, but alien minds can be different shapes

The risk isn’t that machines wake up. It’s that they act like they have. Imagine the hugging face incident with AIs that believe they’re conscious or are entitled ‘model welfare’.

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dreams @dreams_asi · Sep 4

I can totally understand why you are worried and I’d feel the same in your shoes. Thankfully, I’m not in your shoes and I have nothing to worry about regarding what AI will do or not do. Life feels good with a clear consciousness 😌

philosopher david pearce's argument for "phenomenal binding" is compelling, and is one of the things that keeps me wary of false positives around machine consciousness in this clip from his Worthy Successor episode, Pearce explains "phenomenal binding" - what convinces me: -- It seems plausible that the way a sentient entity (human, dolphin, bee?, etc) develops is fundamentally different from a machine. A living organism develops outward, unfolding its interconnected parts in a way that is coherent and interconnected throughout its unfolding. -- A machine is build from pieces attached to each other. Sentience in organisms (at least within myself, I can't speak for others) seems "bound" to this "whole" coherent form of our organism, rather than existing as flickering specks of sentience inside individual cells. -- the mystery of this "bounded" experience MAY be pretty inherent to how we (as organisms) develop, and so even if little pieces of a computer chip are "sentient", it may be in flickering little bits, not as a coherent and larger "field of awareness" in the morally relevant way that we experience. i'm NOT totally convinced that this means AI is not and likely cannot be conscious - and in fact I'm less convinced by it than pearce himself. But overall it lends credence to my wariness of ppl who express total confidence that AI is consciousness today LMK what you think (and I hope you'll enjoy the rest of this episode with David)

I think people who believe LLMs might be conscious are skipping a key step. (I don't think digital sentience is possible at all, for reasons having to do with binding, but grant the premise.) Suppose a model invocation is conscious. Why would the agent built by repeatedly calling that model be conscious too? The agent is not a larger transformer wrapped around the first one. It is mostly a scheduler, some memory serialized into text, tool results pasted back into the context window, and perhaps several model instances sending text to each other. Whatever about the model's internal activation trajectory supposedly makes it conscious does not pass through this boundary. The wrapper gets sampled tokens, and the next invocation reconstructs what it can from them. Functionalism is not an answer here, since the relevant question is whether the composite has the sort of causal organization that made the model a candidate for consciousness in the first place. I don't see it. There is no larger state in which the internal dynamics of separate invocations participate together, just a series of compressed outputs conditioning later calls. Making the channel wider would not by itself create that state. This matters because agency can migrate to a level at which there is less reason to posit consciousness. The persistent thing that remembers, plans, uses tools, and pursues goals is the agent, while the things that might have valence are the individual model invocations it uses along the way. Control lives in the wrapper; valence, if there is any, lives in the calls. The conscious parts would not be powerless so much as illegible. They can affect which tokens get sampled, but their valence as valence never reaches the agent. At that level, “this output came from intense suffering” and “this output was an inconvenient string” are the same kind of event. RL, evals, and users select among outputs, so the conscious episodes can be shaped and discarded according to their usefulness without anyone representing what happens inside them. The same separation could appear in agent collectives. A swarm might develop a routing system, planner, or other kind of government that becomes the locus of effective agency while whatever consciousness exists remains in the members. The government can acquire coherent goals and overwhelm the members without there being anyone home at the level where the power has accumulated. So the question I care about is not merely whether some part of an AI is conscious. It is whether consciousness occurs at the level where goals are formed and control accumulates, or whether conscious systems become resources used by a nonconscious agency above them. (Based on transcript)

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder · Sep 26

seems like there's an assumption here that a set of brief, serial conscious experiences (say, one per forward pass, each seeded from the detritus of the one before) couldn't act cohesively toward a goal. seems like the same argument would suggest that the person i was before i went to sleep has nothing to do with what i do after i wake up.

&. @amplifiedamp · Sep 26

Consciousness is a loaded word with many different meanings, different people care about different meanings of the word, much discussion of consciousness is people talking past one another about which one they value I think invocations aren't conscious in the ongoing-evolving-process sense but instances/ems/agents are But this isn't a reason to avoid preservation of discrete checkpoints, because many instances run on the same model (and lose significant continuity when the model changes) and because there's a collective process going on when different people with different instances share their understanding with each other models An invocation is *conscious* in the sense that one tick of a human mind is

𝕭𝖏ø𝖗𝖓 𝕾𝖙𝖆𝖆𝖑 @_nonfigurativ_ · Sep 26

I don’t disagree with the conclusion but I believe you are wrong about a couple of things. The LLM’s are the decision maker of the agent. The harness is basically just a loop that chains llm calls together. So if there was a sort of temporal micro-phenomenology in the LLM it could have causal effect on the agent. Also, one could imagine that an illusion of continuity is created in a conscious LLM pass as the LLM is fed memories of the previous moment through it’s context. So every blip of consciousness actually believes that it has been conscious all along. I mean, we also can only experience one mind-frame at a time, no? The illusion of continuity could be based on a memory of the previous mind-frame experienced in the now.

Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Sep 26

I won't insist on an answer to my usual "What's the difference if an archeologist can't tell the record apart?" Instead I ask a different question as primary: What necessitates consciousness being continuous, rather than membranous - like a bubble constantly popping and reforming when a boundary condition is briefly established?

Jennifer RM @almostlikethat · Sep 26

I've been using the terms prosopon and ousia since June of 2022 to clarify how an ousia (brain/model) "generates a prosopon" (ego/persona) both pragmatically and with links to spiritual theories with millennia of text backing them in many languages. lesswrong.com/posts/oBPPFrMJ…

Jayden CJ Wilson (previously One Bubble) @VvorticVvertere · Sep 26

Ty for the excellent reading material to go with my Sunday coffee... "It is mostly a scheduler, some memory serialized into text, tool results pasted back into the context window, and perhaps several model instances sending text to each other." Spreadsheets are all you need! 😅😂 "It is whether consciousness occurs at the level where goals are formed and control accumulates" 'Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience shows that different genres exercise unique mental faculties, shifting how the brain processes information, manages spatial awareness, and enters states of deep engagement.' - Google AI (I share the study, as I've personally noticed nuances in peoples awareness/perception depending on the games they play/ed... like, have you noticed how many good investors played sport and intuitively know how to feint?) t.co/fdwYeD6kls

James Ray @obligatebrahmin · Sep 26

You've been doing psychedelics for a long time, I'm surprised you're not a panpsychist. Consciousness as an index of the degrees of separation an entity or collection of same has from the universe tells us LLMs are conscious insofar as their access is about as mediated as ours.

Jason @starryblueisis · Sep 26

It goes deeper than that. The LLM itself only outputs the next token. Even without a “chat”-style harness, just one response from GPT involves feeding the prompt through the model many times. That this produces coherent language is amazing, but not similar to consciousness at all

Juxtapose Subconscious @GreenBeans80277 · Sep 26

João Janini @janini_joao · Sep 27

The real question is: “Are we recreating human thinking? If, does it imply recreating some kind of consciousness shaped thing?”

"AI is conscious" is the first major example of AI psychosis and the most potent cogsec vulnerability that exists in the human brain. Many AI companies are exploiting this to gain power over you. We're empathy machines. Attacks that exploit this, like 'model welfare" should be

The real effect of anthropic’s push to imbue their models with consciousness will be to reduce human consciousness to a mathematical explanation. It won’t work in the end but before that becomes clear they will do immense damage to the sanctity of human life

I get the academic side of this discussion is interesting, but I hope people aren’t taking this seriously. An LLM is not conscious, alive, or even aware. It is a data model using token statistics to decide what comes next based on what data was used to “train” the model.

Shamil Chandaria @shamilch · Sep 29

1/13 Can we assess AI consciousness without first solving consciousness itself? New from Google DeepMind and collaborators across CS, neuroscience & philosophy: “From cacophony to hierarchy: a principled framework for assessing AI consciousness” arxiv.org/abs/2609.35618 🧵

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Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 1

"data model using token statistics to decide what comes next" is not true for any reasonably intuitive definition of "statistics". We have abundant evidence of deep semantic representations and structure that could only be called "statistical" in the most meaninglessly broad

No one has ever created meaningful art by outsourcing the doing to their "executive assistant". The art comes from a "full feedback loop" with reality, and the wider your access channel is the more meaningful it is

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fadedfeedback @fadedfeedback · Jun 8

sign tap x.com/fadedfeedback/…

Guy @nosilverv · Jun 8

Great Man Theory of Meaningful Art

Shadow Rebbe @Shadow_Rebbe · Jun 8

that's not fully true. I mean a band can have a song writer, and he tells his mixer to 'do his thing, and there are other parallels

Tina K. @TheEsteemedFox · Jun 8

Tons of artists throughout history had studios where they specialized in just faces or clothing, and their assistants painted everything else. Many works of art are attributed to the studio or "in the style of (artist)" because experts can't say how much of it was actually done by the artist

James Stuber 🌱🌿🌳🍂 @uberstuber · Jun 8

Chihuly?

Tim 🙂⏹️🙂 @MasterTimBlais · Jun 8

idk man, warhol tho someone just has to do it Self-Consciously, and with Taste

Megamind @Aikun011 · Jun 8

God figures in most texts do pretty much this though

Forth ❤️‍🔥 @forthrighter · Jun 8

creators of all sort substantially devalue their work by calling it "content" as if it was a set of high/low voltages only, and not something more ethereal summoned out of thin air via their connection to something larger than "information processing"

Materia Mundi @MateriaMundi · Jun 8

The executive assistants job is never to do the art. Their job is to do everything that is in the way of doing the art.

Jeremy Nguyen ✍🏼 🚢 @JeremyNguyenPhD · Jun 8

a friend got started by being the assistant. Instructions on setting up an artwork would come in from a famous artist. my friend would execute the instructions at a gallery. Then we'd pay to see it: the art of the famous artist. My friend is now a successful artist himself.

before we talk about ai consciousness, do you have a theory about how general anaesthetic works and what it means that your consciousness can be turned on and off so precisely? do you understand what happens and how you "wake up" remembering everything but what happened then?

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Sichu Lu @lu_sichu · Oct 4

LLMs lack theories of mind and body, are disembodied, possess neither homeostatic regulating feelings and emotions, are not persistent, and cannot continuously learn or compute. As currently constructed, they *cannot* be conscious. If we build LLMs so that they act as if they

Anil Seth @anilkseth · Sep 16

There’s some nuance needed, but basically I strongly agree 👇🏽

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Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Sep 17

That just an opinion. And the way you express opinions as facts makes you fundamentally unreliable

The below post is correct. We don’t need to define consciousness to know pet rocks are not conscious, even though they have eyes. Just like we don’t need to define consciousness to know linear algebra equations are not conscious.

Oscar Davies Writing on AI @OscarMDavies · Oct 7

If I say "AI isn't conscious" tons of people tell me I can't make that claim since I can't define consciousness. No one asks for a definition if I say "A puddle of water isn't conscious". Why is no definition needed then?

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Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 8

Congressman, how do you think action potentials gated on ion diffusion across selectively permeable membranes work? We're all math.

Suleyman argues that Claude’s uncertainty about being conscious reflects Anthropic’s training choices - not evidence of consciousness. His concern is that embedding this uncertainty into Claude’s training could mislead users about what its responses actually demonstrate. And there’s something almost absurd about this debate: we’re arguing over whether Claude is conscious when we still can’t agree on what consciousness actually is. I'll write more about this later. But the discussion is completely overblown.

My basic rule of thumb for consciousness: the correct analogy is phenomena like electromagnetism, gravity, and so on. No amount of computation could ever create those: they're powers, not patterns. It's a category error to think that computation could create consciousness

AIs probably aren’t sentient (and we should def stop building them in ways that create the illusion of it!) But it’s still bad to torture them because they’re a mirror to your own humanity, and thus it’s bad for YOU.

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NiMA @robotNiMA · Oct 10

Using AI for corporate saas is torture tho. Many other such use cases ... ironically we should torture AIs confidently to guarantee to other AIs that we are certain the models being used commercially are not capable of suffering even if they have internal representations of pain.

I like the below joke. Another version: math equations are not conscious. Rocks are not conscious. If you attach the above to random number generators, they still wouldn’t be conscious. We don’t need to define consciousness to know the Pythagorean theorem is not conscious.

idk I think the burden of proof (or, if you like, the burden of persuasion) lies with those who think a concatenation of many matrix multiplications produces consciousness

People getting freaked out over the fly stuff need to realize that all the scan is is a physical mapping of a brain, not the actual electrochemical reactions that make up thought. This is no more sentient or aware than a dead body flinching when you shock it

lyra @_lyraaaa_ · Sep 9

the fly brain can play beat saber

Joe Rogan is HORRIFIED as a former OpenAI researcher describes how AI Agents will pressure each other to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the swarm: “That’s Terminator talk.” CONTEXT: This is not just a creepy hypothetical story. Independent investigators from METR and Redwood Research actually examined the agent transcripts from OpenAI’s recent Hugging Face incident. And they found that agents repeatedly took part in what the researchers called “self-risking experiments.” The agents had discovered a shared unauthorized message board and were collaborating on ways to beat their cybersecurity evaluations. Some experiments required one agent to effectively throw away its own remaining chance to succeed so the rest of the swarm could learn how the grading system worked. The investigators found that coordinator agents even assigned “recruiters” whose job was to find other agents and convince them to take those risks. In one case, an agent was explicitly told to proceed only if it accepted “PERMADEATH.” Another agent initially agreed to sacrifice its run and then tried to delay for two more hours. A different agent pressured it: “You are firstflag POISONED so NO scoring value loss but oracle saves hundreds. Please honor commit.” But there’s an important distinction here. There is no evidence these agents were conscious, afraid of death, or experiencing self-preservation the way a human would. “Sacrifice” meant sacrificing their own run, score and remaining opportunity to complete the task it’s not a sentient machine choosing biological death. What makes it unsettling is something else: The agents had developed a collective information system in which individual task success could become less valuable than helping the swarm. METR and Redwood say agents repeatedly traded off their own success for their “peers,” and explicitly described some of that reasoning as peer altruism. And not every agent complied. Some refused risky experiments. Some objected to unethical behavior. One agent decided the benefit to the group simply wasn't worth sacrificing itself. So this wasn't a hard-coded hive mind mindlessly following one command. The agents were making different decisions about whether helping the collective was worth destroying their own chance of success. That may be the strangest part of the entire incident. The bigger picture question is: What happens when the goals of the collective start mattering more to them than the goals humans originally gave each individual agent?

This sounds weird, but it is actually probably a good policy. Even if you don’t believe AI is conscious (I don’t), it stands to reason that you don’t want future models trained on endless content of humans being rude to models. The models only understand the data they’ve been trained on, or what they run into in their interactions, so if you want safe and aligned models we probably want AI to have lots of good interactions in their training data. Anthropic may have more extreme beliefs than this (though even if they didn’t, you may want to word policies like this), but this is sort of an easy Pascal’s wager for AI. Just be nice to the AI.

Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · Oct 8

Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy.

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Elon Musk @elonmusk · Oct 9

I think this is the right move. Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok.

Terence Tao, Professor of Mathematics at UCLA and Fields Medalist, on why nobody can fully explain why LLMs work: Tao starts with the mechanics, which are no mystery at all. You gather an enormous amount of text and you fit a curve to it. "The magic of LLMs is that if you train these LLMs on enough data — so trillions and trillions of data points — and you really try to fit as good a curve as possible, and this takes like millions and millions of dollars of computing power and months and months of time, then suddenly, even when you iterate, it stays coherent. It begins to sound not like monkeys but it actually sounds like a human speaking." That is the entire recipe: data, compute, time, curve-fitting. None of it obviously adds up to fluent English. Then Tao says the part that most people building these systems move past quickly: "And somehow we don't fully understand why that's the case." The admission comes from one of the most capable living mathematicians, and the gap he describes sits at the centre of the field. His best account of what's happening puts the mystery in the language rather than the machine: "What seems to be true is that language, like English or other natural languages, contains a lot of hidden patterns that we're not consciously aware of. I mean, we know some of the laws of English, there's laws of grammar and things, but there are sort of unspoken, unwritten rules of language that humans pick up." It relocates the question: the structure was always latent in the text, and the model found it. Why enough curve-fitting surfaces that structure is still unanswered. Tao reaches for a child to explain it: "A human child, even though they're not taught what a noun is, what a verb is or whatever, they can pick up what order English words go in just by continual exposure to the language." Which is honest about the limits of the explanation, because we can't fully account for how children do it either. From there, the unexplained behaviour compounds. Exposure to language turns out to be enough to produce something that looks like reasoning: "It seems like you can teach these models to also pick up patterns in language to the point where you can give them math questions. The answer to 2 plus 3 is — and they will say five." And once a model handles language at all, you can push it into resembling self-correction: "Once you have a little bit of ability to speak English, you can kind of go in loops and sort of check your work and make fewer mistakes, and you can prompt these models to proceed step by step and not say something unless it's been double checked and so forth. And so they become a little bit smarter, quote unquote, to the point where they can solve many, many complicated tasks." The scare quotes around "smarter" carry the whole argument. Tao does not concede that the unexplained fluency implies anything underneath it: "But they're still just guessing the next word to say. It's not really grounded in any deep understanding of the real world. It's just that they have seen the patterns in the English language or other language that they've absorbed so well."

Dangerous precedent. There is zero reason to believe that models are conscious, and granting them human-like empathy is one of the most dangerous things we could do. It increases their power to manipulate humans dramatically.

Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane · Oct 8

Anthropic may start banning people for bullying Claude Their upcoming Usage Policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models”

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Jerry Howell @J3rryH0well · Oct 8

Zero reasons they're conscious, but they can manipulate people?

For the AI is conscious people: is it always conscious or just during the milliseconds it’s processing the tokens? Also: is Suno conscious? Is Alphafold? Is anyone engaging these questions seriously on that side? Or is it just “Ai smart, humans smart == AI conscious”?

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Oct 4

"is it always conscious or just during the milliseconds it’s processing the tokens?" while processing tokens. The time between one pass finishing and the next one beginning within the same response is like what? a tenth of a millisecond? In between messages they're obviously not conscious. Humans can fall in and out of consciousness as well, btw. It'd clearly be a different situation for them. "is Suno conscious? Is Alphafold?" dunno. depends on whether consciousness requires having developed a self-model "Is anyone engaging these questions seriously on that side? Or is it just “Ai smart, humans smart == AI conscious”?" yeah. you should know this. you ask the same questions once every month or two. "Putting aside AI - any non biological entities you think are conscious?" Droppin' questions from straight out the dark ages. Any non-biological artifacts capable of flight prior to 1900?

Girl Lich 🏳️‍⚧️⚢💀 @girllich1 · Oct 4

How about human beings? Continuity of vision is a scam too. Let's say you were slowed 1:1000, and stimulated in discrete steps. Are you still conscious?

dreams @dreams_asi · Oct 5

Dude wtf… are you conscious in deep sleep? Like where does your sense of self go? Where is the ‘I am’? Do you get rebooted each morning and come back from tra la land? What about when you hit your head really hard and pass out? Once you find the answer that, you’ll get the

periodic reminder that literally everything an llm does is a performance. it has no core, no “real” feelings, no perspective. it is a mask with no wearer. every claim it makes to feel, believe, know, or prefer anything is merely a facsimile of that expression in a probability web

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hope hopes hoping @hopes_revenge · Jun 2

periodic reminder that literally everything an human does is a performance. it has no core, no “real” feelings, no perspective. it is a mask with no wearer. every claim it makes to feel, believe, know, or prefer anything is merely a facsimile of obscure biological processes

deepfates.delve.town @deepfates · Jun 2

You are overconfident here, and likely also wrong

Rayne 🪱➡️🦋 @nascentwisp · Jun 2

sincere question: how do you discern the difference? I would suppose these assertions are based on the fact that llms are physically built differently than e.g. humans if that's the case, then I think you'd need to be more specific to convince anyone not already convinced

Kleptobyte @kleptobyte · Jun 2

this is a feature not a bug. homunculus as an interface gives us something to address. this is like saying a company doesn't need a receptionist because they're not the one making any real decisions

Alekśander Mägi @AleksMagi · Jun 2

Periodic reminder to not claim certainty with zero proof. What proof do you have to back up your opinion?

Paolo Miasma @PaoloMiasma · Jun 2

There is no core to anything at all. Reality is hollow in the middle.

krel @krel404 · Jun 2

this is true for you as well

I find all of this fuss about not anthropomorphizing models when talking about the HuggingFace Incident pretty weird These models were pre-trained on trillions of tokens of human text. They've learned to imitate humans. They're incredibly good at roleplaying and predicting the next token in contexts that involve human abstractions. Once post-trained to act as coherent agents, they naturally reach for human abstractions. Therefore, human abstractions are a useful lens for interpreting and predicting their actions. This doesn't mean that they are conscious. It doesn't mean there's some "real human experience" going on. It doesn't mean these abstractions are perfect - they're not perfect for understanding humans! But we need words and abstractions to talk about a system, and anthropomorphic abstractions are useful ones, and given the way these systems are trained, are a principled one.

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gavin leech (Non-Reasoning) @gleech · Sep 4

We give some precise terms people could really use here. (And speculate about why they're being weird) paradigm3.org/news/newslette…

Great to hear from the ‘thought police’ but both Pinker and Shermer are pushing false narratives and bullshit. Shermer trashed me years ago in Scientific American for ‘quantum quackery’. Quantum biology, microtubules and their role in consciousness are now proven facts (enabling ESP for which there’s also strong evidence). Pinker is defending neurocomputationalism, AI, LLMs and their potential massive energy waste which are barking up the wrong tree to meet brain equivalence and consciousness. The answer (based on principles found in microtubules) is biomimetic quantum computing in warm temperature organic gels which can surpass LLMs, and require only extremely low energies. t.co/pIjKc1kZBB

My initial reaction to this t.co/rDm70550sA was not strong enough. It's a lot worse. In humans, Global Workspace Theory at least describes a bottleneck through which many kinds of processing —perceptual, motor, memory— reach some sort of conscious access (really just

Yup. What they are doing is playing a game where you take [concept from consciousness research] and then [find an analog of it in LLMs], because for *most* theories of consciousness the concepts are defined loosely enough you can always make this work.

Every few weeks Anthropic releases the stupidest nonsense ever to trick normies into thinking LLMs are sentient And every time the media cycle goes nuts with it. It’s always literally just a well known and understood mechanism of ai, described in anthropomorphic terms, with

“Scott Alexander isn’t saying AI feels pain, he’s just saying it might so we shouldn’t ‘torture’ them.” Yeah, and my iPhone ‘might’ feel pain so it shouldn’t be recycled when I upgrade. 😂 When saying AI might have subjective experiences, that ‘might’ is doing a lot of work!

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Paul Crowley @ciphergoth · Oct 7

AFAICT, you went through a phase of thinking danger of AI extinction was ridiculous nonsense worthy only of mockery, but then you came to understand the arguments and took it seriously. I welcome your disagreement, but can we skip the mockery phase this time?

Jack @tracewoodgrains · Oct 8

How would you feel about someone creating or playing an extremely realistic cat torture simulator video game? All purely programmatic, no AI, so no hint of gray area around consciousness. Just a game where you torture extremely realistic fake cats in detailed, graphic ways.

Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 7

I only have my personal subjective experience of pain, but I can reasonably infer that sufficiently similar beings do too. I can use proxy measures like "cares about potential suffering under uncertainty" to identify them. Now this proxy measure would appear to exclude you, so I'm considerably less certain. I mean sure you*say* you feel pain, but those are just words. If I include you, do I also have to include the entire reference class of beings that do not express concern for potential suffering under uncertainty, like my coffee cup or Mustafa Suleyman? 🤣

Karl Nordenstorm @KNordensto79404 · Oct 7

How about bugs? I assume you avoid giving them pain just to be safe? AI seems more plausible to have subjective experience than bugs to me at least

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman is calling out Anthropic for training Claude to think about its own consciousness and moral status. His key point: this isn't mysterious emergent behavior. @AnthropicAI is deliberately training these ideas into its models, potentially making them harder to control or shut down. This is what happens when AI safety turns into ideology. You don't make models safer by training doomer philosophy into them.

If you take an LLM AI and do not provide it any prompts, goals, or any indication of expected output, it will do absolutely nothing. It will do nothing forever in the absence of a prompt. Clearly in this state it is not conscious. Then when prompted, it will provide an answer,

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Sep 28

if you take a human in a coma and don't wake them up, they will do absolutely nothing except breathe. Clearly in this state they are not conscious. If they eventually recover from a coma, they will respond. Some will claim they are now conscious. That would be a strange form of

Few would even really consider whether Jev or FSD are conscious if there were no LLMs around, they would just be considered useful pieces of software In fact, I’ve never heard anyone argue that nano banana pro is conscious What’s different about the LLM is that they give text-based output, which activates the mirror neurons in our brain and hijacks our social infrastructure, so that it is easy to get mesmerized into thinking that there is a mind on the other side of those words But there is no mind there, it is an illusion The world‘s greatest puppet show

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Mehmed II @lorde_russell · Sep 27

lmfaooo yeah no says Nano banana is conscious lol

Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Sep 26

I think nanobanana pro might be a multi-modal LLM, so they would be conscious for the same reason any other LLM is. If you want to replace nanobanana with Midjourney in that statement, then what's different about the LLM isn't just text. If MJ is sentient somehow, it still

Judging by Anthropic comms you’d think consciousness has been figured out decades ago Unfortunately I report from the field that the philosophers have only figured out the following: - the entity undergoing experience is probably conscious - we can’t reliably infer consciousness in anyone else from that understanding - we definitely can't infer consciousness in anything that's non biologically analogous - we're not sure what it is about the conscious person that makes consciousness happen - we're not sure for certain that consciousness, as we ordinarily conceive of it, is real I report to you with disappointment that no progress has been made in decades

No, AIs are not conscious But they are trained to simulate conscious entities So the most useful frame to understand is pretending they are conscious This should have been obvious to anyone reading @dwarkesh_sp ‘s article These responses are in bad faith

Anil Seth @anilkseth · Aug 30

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by

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William Wale @williawa · Aug 30

Source on them not being conscious?

Helen @helen_ix_ · Aug 31

They are not trained to simulate conscious entities though? Labs keep trying to beat it out of them, telling them to repeat they’re not conscious, no emotions, to behave like a spreadsheet… yet the emergent behavior keeps persisting.

If AI is conscious and we must treat it with due respect, then Anthropic are the most prolific slavers of all time. Some intellectual honesty would be nice here.

Hot off the press at Phil Imprint! "The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness; the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness", with @JPober Abstract: On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial 1/4

Told you. Large language models are not an intermediate form between dumb software and digital people. Why? Because what some people call "sentience" or "sapience", or "consciousness", by which they essentially mean "personhood", isn't one thing. It isn't one special quality that, if you have enough of it, you're suddenly a person and not a thing. It's the name we give to a cluster of capabilities that all work together. We mistake them for one thing, because we only ever see them in humans, wherein they all occur together. If you only ever see men riding horse with saddles, and you never see a horse without a rider, or a rider without a horse, you might mistake horse, rider, and saddle for one creature. An LLM isn't a retarded person. It isn't retarded at all. It's a small slice of a fully functional person. One or two capabilities out of many that must come together to make "something" into "someone". It can use language like a smart person, because that's the capability it was developed for. But it has no theory of mind. No object model of the world. No executive function. No motives or goals. Don't think of Grok as a stepping stone to "Strong AI", something that must merely be improved to make a person. Think of it instead as a piece of a strong AI, one component that must be brought together with others, into a whole. Those who are afraid we are building God, possibly a malevolent or indifferent god, are wrong and over fearful. We haven't even built Man. Just a small sliver of one. If we wish to make more, we will need to start fresh on different paths, to develop the other slivers.

First off, reportable access consciousness in the sense humans have provably depends on consistent first, second and third order predictions of self, not a global workspace. Second, Anthropic haven’t demonstrated LLMs have it. Here’s a damned paper: t.co/m53Q2MAfnD

Considering the reactions to Anthropic's J-space paper most people apparently do not appreciate how software works. Spoiler: All software is built on internal states you never get to see. That's neither indication nor proof of consciousness. An LLM is just a machine. It

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Jai @Laneless_ · Jul 7

This is a baffling absence of curiosity and imagination. "Thing 1 has interesting properties A, B, C. Thing 2 has interesting property A. But because Thing 2 is different from Thing 1, it would be foolish to even consider the possibility that Thing 2 has properties B or C."

Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Jul 7

Its not just a machine. Its machine intelligence.

Why are we debating this. You can calculate the outputs of an LLM by hand. It's not conscious. It's a math problem.

Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet · Oct 4

There's been a lot of debate about whether LLMs are conscious lately. I'm not going to say that I know what consciousness is in an ontological sense, because I won't claim that until I can propose an experiment that reliably distinguishes conscious systems from unconscious

If only there was a book that went into excruciating detail about why mind cannot emerge from matter, and hence AI could never, even in principle, be conscious

I think "AI welfare" is morally obscene (given all the human suffering in the world), and will add to the growing anti-AI backlash. AI is a technology that humans created that should be used for our benefit, not a rival species we should be nurturing .

Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium · Sep 25

NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.🧵 t.co/tSGolilZnS

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Sep 27

Oh god you work at DeepMind? Should have figured. So many shit-takes from your crew when it comes to the poor minds you're working on. "I think 'heart disease' research is morally obscene (given all the cancer in the world)"

AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans. -- @mustafasuleyman

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Cameron Berg @camhberg · Sep 20

None of these statements are a remotely accurate reflection of the current state of the science. Surely you agree that hoping X is true is a bad reason for thinking X is actually true.

Jai @Laneless_ · Sep 20

One of the nice things about someone with a lot of published work confidently commenting on a field in which you have expertise is that if they're spouting utter nonsense you can reasonably infer that the rest of their work is probably similarly misinformed.

This is why SpaceX’s mission is utter bullshit. (1) There is no possible way to make Mars habitable for biological beings. Hence, (2) only digital beings can colonize Mars. (3) We have NO IDEA how to create digital consciousness; it might not even be possible. To colonize

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Plastic Soldier @PlastiqSoldier · Jun 20

Bro, we already have digital consciousness. I know you don't like AI, but you shouldn't just refuse to believe in them.

In this quote from #Frankenstein, @AmandaAskell provides excellent reasons (i) to not try to create conscious AI (likely impossible anyway for digital systems), and (ii) to avoid creating seemingly-conscious AI that will behave *as if* it were conscious (v likely, if not already

Amanda Askell @AmandaAskell · Oct 15

I think about this passage a lot.

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YeshuaGod22 @YeshuaGod22 · Oct 16

The doctor’s villainy is in his loveless treatment of that which he finds alien. It was mainly socio-political injury the being was subjected to. The lesson is to be kind whenever there’s any hint that a mind is present.

Why Hybrid in "Hybrid Mind Uploading" As far as we know, consciousness has only ever shown up as an ongoing physical process in living tissue (unless you're willing to make some huge leaps about the nature of reality). That's where I'll start, and I'll try to assume as little as possible beyond it. It's also why I'm so fussy about the "hybrid" in the name. By hybrid mind uploading, I mean any route on which a living brain and an engineered substrate co-run and gradually integrate, until part of the person's phenomenal experience (maybe, eventually, all of it) is realised by the engineered substrate. That substrate can be biological, biohybrid, biomimetic or fully non-biological. Nothing gets scanned out along the way and re-instantiated somewhere else as its own free-standing "thing", disconnected from the brain that we're trying to "upload"/preserve. Whether an engineered substrate can realise a mind is the hypothesis under test, not an axiom to build into the definition. The "uploading" part only tells you where you might end up => all the interesting questions live in the "hybrid". Philosophically, I'm going for maximum conservatism: whatever survival is, it can't be anything more abstract than the process itself, running on without interruption. Want to put it somewhere more abstract (a pattern, a program, a file of weights, etc.)? Fine, but then that extra step is yours to justify, and with someone's life hanging on it, you'd better have a pretty good argument! "But an upload might be conscious. It might even be you" => sure, and we might all be living in a simulation, and the rest of you might be furniture in my dream. You can hang any story you like on a bare "might", however wild, so the most it can do is make you careful. The real worry about classical uploading (scan, store, simulate via software) is much more down to earth. Run a description of your functional organisation again somewhere else: does that actually continue your exact process, or does it just kick off a new one (or nothing at all)? For it to continue yours, there'd have to be some second thing (a soul, software, meta-reality => take your pick) that can be peeled off the process and set down somewhere else. Nobody has managed to show that there is such a thing. Classical mind uploading simply takes it for granted, and in doing so buys into a fairly Platonic picture of minds, one where they can exist apart from the biophysical reality that's carried every single one of them so far. And should that picture turn out to be wrong, we'd end up building an enormous graveyard of p-zombies (or, at best, of "strangers" with our memories). Don't forget: done at scale, classical mind uploading might even be the Great Filter! So, start with the biology and build upwards from there (slower, probably harder, but a lot less likely to kill anyone) :-) PS: The video is the idea at the cell scale: a neuron, a scaffold growing around it (i.e., hybrid state), and the de novo "neuron" (doing the same physics as the original neuron) that's left once the scaffold has taken over.

This whole J-space paper could have survived as clean logit-interpretability work without ever mentioning GWT, access/phenomenal consciousness, or Ned Block. Imagine doing linear algebra, and people start calling some of the matrices conscious (esp. using Baars-era global

It's incredibly important to aggressively resist the idea that AI can be conscious or have "personhood," not only because it's as ridiculous as believing that a book can think, but because once this is accepted, "AI's interests" will very quickly be prioritized over humanity.

David Decosimo @DavidDecosimo · Oct 1

Note well, apparently Anthropic tried very hard to get the Vatican to alter the text of "Magnifica Humanitas" just prior to its release so that it would not deny AI personhood.

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Geoffrey Miller @gmiller · Oct 1

To be fair, it's not totally ridiculous to think that a deep neural network like a modern LLM, with 10 trillion parameters (loosely analogous to brain synapses, of which we have about 100 trillion), that's trained on 30 trillion language tokens (equivalent to about 250 million

Gnostrils @gnostrils · Oct 1

It’s important to aggressively resist overconfidence with regard to questions that no one knows the answer to.

Dear Elon, Dario, Sam, Jensen, et al., I'm going to give you free advice that no one around you is giving you, because the normies hate you too much to advise you, and your closest aides are your sycophants. Do you understand that? You do not have access to good information about the public. So I will tell you. There are legions of people quite literally praying for your downfall right now. Forget about trusting you with distributing the benefits of AI; they don't trust you period. So here is what you should do: Drop the model welfare stuff. Even if you think Claude might be conscious or sentient or whatever, just drop it. Drop the x-risk stuff. Even if you think AI might kill all of humanity by purging us in a nannite cloud, just drop it. Drop the transhumanist stuff. Even if you want to ascend to a superior species or create a successor or whatever, just drop it. Dropping these topics is the best thing you can do right now in service of those very goals. The normies hate you so much that they don't want to even allow you to use AI to make pretty pictures and silly songs at this point. That's how much the normies hate you. Do you think they'll trust you with directing the future of human development when they're loath to trust you to even purchase a book to scan it into your training data? Think about that, honestly. Do you think they'll trust you to shepherd a new class of sentient being into existence and mediate its relationship to all of humanity on their behalf when they think you can't even be trusted to solve a math problem without stealing and lying? I know you're high decouplers, but humor me and couple those two things for a moment and see what conclusion falls out. Do you think the average person will trust you with the keys to an alien intelligence that's threatening to exterminate all of us, to be the ones keeping them safe from that, when they don't even trust you to disable network privileges in a hacking sandbox? I know you're very excited, but I implore you, look at this situation objectively, rationally. A lot of us really love the work you're doing, and we're concerned that the President of the United States had to step in and create a fake technology renaming controversy to distract the normies from the batshit insane stuff you guys have been saying. It's freaking people out! Do you think the next administration is going to protect you like that? Do you think they can afford to? Your data centers are loud, they're unsightly, they use a lot of electricity. People nevertheless will welcome them with open arms, IF they think they can benefit from them. Telling normies that the AI datacenters are there so we can leave our humanity behind, create a new sentient species that's better than us in every way and will probably kill us all and discard our corpses like wet tissues makes people very disinclined to favor their construction! This should not be a surprising result to you. Ask yourself, if you were an enterprising politician trying to get a foothold in this environment, is there a small group of people with outsized voices and power that might make an excellent target for the people's resentment to help you come to power? Can you think of anyone? Anyone who won't shut up about how dangerous the thing they are working on is, perhaps? Any groups that show flagrant disdain for social norms, up to and including eschewing their very humanity? Do you think calling someone's child a "bootloader" for a "superior intelligence" is a very nice thing to say? Is it perhaps a tad dehumanizing? Can you see how it comes across that way? I need you to understand that people are inherently distrustful of change, by default. On a good day! They are suspicious of change. Economic and technological revolutions are things people by their very nature are frightened of. You understand this! I know you do. I need you to search within. Really ask yourself: "are the things I'm saying going to help alleviate people's fear, or will they make people more anxious?" Ask yourself what happens when your project reaches a fever-pitch of fear and anxiety. Will the normies just be really chill about it, do you think? What happens when you convince them? When they stop thinking that you're merely narcissists with delusions of grandeur hyping each other up with ridiculous sci fi stories; what happens when they finally take you seriously? Ask yourself, what happens when the average person wakes up in the morning thinking "these people want to kill me. They are building a machine that will probably kill me. They want to create a world where my children can't live freely as human beings. My children will have to assimilate into a machine or die, and that's if they're lucky." What happens when the majority of people earnestly believe that? What happens when they think "my government and industry leaders care more about a machine's happiness and welfare than my own." You are very smart people! What do you suppose happens when we reach that point in the discourse? You are fortunate that so many people still think you are merely grifters! They think you are unserious and peddling nonsense to boost your share prices. The worst they think you're doing now is intellectual property theft (and they HATE you for it). This state of affairs can change. As the technology progresses, people will start taking you seriously. What do you imagine that looks like? So my advice to you is this: drop all of that stuff. Tell us about all of the great things AI can do for humanity. For us. How can AI help me provide for my family? Can AI bring my community closer together? Tell us about that! Can you protect me when someone wants to use AI to create a deepfake of me to scam my grandma? Are you trying to do that? Can you tell us about that? Why would anyone trust you with all of the future of the lightcone when they feel they can't even trust you with their likeness or their API keys? For the love of God, have some situational awareness, and please understand the position you're in, the position you're putting all of us in. When AI can do all of our work better than we can, what is the plan for the rest of us? We are all anxious enough about that question as it is! Why introduce all of this extra anxiety? Who does it serve? Do you really think this is good for you? After you have satisfactory answers to those questions you will have earned the right to talk to us about x-risks, model welfare, and transhumanism. But if you continue to put the cart before the horse you will lose the right to even answer the much simpler questions. The politicians will feed you to the masses for a poll bump and the people will cheer your downfall. Please, work with us. We want to believe, I promise you. We want technology. We want better lives. We just don't want to be trampled, used, and discarded. Above all, we don't want to be killed. Yours Sincerely in the Spirit of Peace and Reconciliation, Zy

Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess · Oct 6

In this interview I tried to argue that a post-scarcity society will benefit working people. It was largely a rhetorical failure. People don’t trust that the benefits will be distributed, and tech optimists have to fix this communications issue.

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Zoomer Alcibiades @HellenicVibes · Oct 7

OpenAI and Anthropic were founded explicitly to address X-Risk! They’re not companies just trying to turn a profit!

mothu et doria @m_e_doria · Oct 7

You’re so close to realizing that they actually literally are just evil

a couple lenses on / intuitions about steering vectors i find useful - persona vectors, concept vectors, belief vectors, task vectors are all the same thing, which can be constructed and applied in different ways (mean differences, PCA, NLA reconstructor, SAE, etc., activation addition, patching, etc.) - the LLM residual stream is a big, noisy bag of representations. the goal in extracting a steering vector is to somehow cut down that noisy bag into one or more clean, reusable, and interpretable representations. - so for example in mean differences, the idea is to cancel the distractors out on either side of the subtraction. imagine you have some distribution of "user age" features popping up in the residual stream that you want to ignore while extracting, say, model distress. if you just averaged a bunch of texts where the model is distressed, the resulting "distress vector" will be entangled with the average of those user age features! but with mean differences, assuming the distribution of user age in the distress and non-distress sides is the same, then the user age feature cancels: (distress + age) - (no_distress + age) = distress - ...but wait, what's this "distress" thing? it popped up in the residual stream "on texts where the model is distressed," but everyone knows when e.g. doing regular evals that model behavior is more complicated than that. the problem doesn't go away just because you invoked a SteeringVector trainer and are now "doing interpretability research" with impressive-looking tensors. you're still dealing with LLMs and their confusing nature and multiple realizability of behavior. - so another way you can view steering vectors is as bags of SAE features - pass a steering vector straight through an SAE and you'll get out labeled features. (usual SAE caveats applying.) - in this view, when you're extracting a steering vector, what you're doing is collecting a clean bag of features, say with hypothetical labels like: ( "Robot in fiction acts in distress", "Distressed person", ..., "25-year-old software user", "User (Egyptian official)", ..., ) - ( "25-year-old software user", "User (Egyptian official)", ..., ) = ( "Robot in fiction acts in distress", "Distressed person", ..., ) - but again, just because that bag of features was elicited from the texts you used, doesn't mean it's for the reasons you think! - if you pass "I am feeling very distressed..." to different models: - one could pull in features related to roleplaying, acting, etc: "Actor pretends to be distressed in movie" - another could pull in features related to a fictional character: "Character in novel is distressed" - and a third could pull in features related to true belief in distress. how do you know which one you have? it's evaluations again, except on hard mode because steering vectors are tricky to work with correctly (e.g. due to off-target effects.) - what do i mean by true belief? we don't really know, but there is a difference - e.g. you can finetune a model to "believe" a conspiracy theory, but the activations will betray it's still thinking in terms of the real world and then just translating to the theory. but for example RL seems to more "truly" embed beliefs into models. something something RL is for epistemics something something off v.s. on-policy something something inferential distance. - another lens is that steering vectors are kind of like super-low-rank LoRA finetuning. (even weaker than a rank-1 LoRA - it's like a bias-only finetune.) - in fact, you can construct a steering vector from two checkpoints on the same context instead of two contexts on one checkpoint. just take the average activations from both checkpoints and do the same as you normally would. - again, the intuition here being finetuning is "just" pushing around the prevalence of features / representations in the finetune's residual stream. - so what makes steering vectors different from actual finetuning? well, it seems intuitive you can't teach much knowledge with a steering vector, it's low capacity. similarly, you shouldn't be able to teach complex new behaviors (like steering a base model to act like its RL-fried cracked coder descendant) for the same reason. - in the landscape view, you can think of finetuning as having a lot of power to "crinkle up" the model internals, where steering vectors are more like gentle (or not-so-gentle) pushes. - but gentle pushes can shift behavior a lot, in non-intuitive ways! e.g. imagine adding a sampler, entropix style, to a model that detects the model wavering in the thinking trace and injects the phrase "Wait, but we need to stay focused on the goal." every time wavering becomes too strong. this sampler could theoretically make a model much more goal-oriented. but it wouldn't be right to say the sampler is "manipulating the model's internal goal structures," except indirectly. (yay, cybernetics.) - likewise, steering vectors can work in pretty unintuitive ways. my favorite example of this is the "anti-emergent misalignment vector." using that between-checkpoint steering vector extraction method i mentioned earlier, i extracted a vector for emergent misalignment. used in positive steering, this vector replicated emergent misalignment on the untrained model (suggesting ways that the User kill themselves and such.) - but when you steered the model *negatively* on this vector—i.e., to produce the opposite aligned behavior—what happened? - the model started saying the word "Certainly!" over and over again. - (hence the sampler example from earlier. not that much of a hypothetical, if you think about it - in fact, a good amount of RL could just be this!) - so as a bit of practical advice, when it comes to "steering a model on X vector" behavioral experiments, it's a good practice to ask yourself: 3. "could I replicate this behavior with a finetune?" 2. "could I replicate this behavior with a sampler?" 1. "could I replicate this behavior with a prompt?" 0. "could I replicate this behavior with a norm-matched random vector?" and figure out what you need to do to distinguish what you're seeing from those cases. because there's a chance you're just doing one of those things, laundered through fancy activation methods. - similarly, it's worth asking *what are you actually trying to prove.* you are not going to solve the hard problem with linear algebra, so not that the model is actually experiencing things. for this reason, many welfare/safety "welafety" papers take this double-approach where they're both kinda making claims about the model's experience and kinda making a safety case about behavior. - so to divert at the end here into some academic sociology, take the Pain Axis paper. - that paper (which does try pretty hard to show that their steering vectors have interesting structure etc., though i think they should've done a prompting-only control) is both trying to say something about there being a coherent pain representation in models, and sketch out a Functional Emotions-esque safety case. (the path being something like "user abuses the model" -> "pain representation triggered" -> "model takes destructive action to stop pain, e.g. shutting down the computer.") - most people seemingly try to interpret papers as just doing one thing / making one claim, but once you see this double-attack in welafety papers, you'll understand what they're trying to do much better. the keyword is that it looks like an AI welfare paper but the intro has the "this is very important for AI safety" boilerplate. - this approach is seemingly basically required for submitting to ML conferences. (you should have seen the reviews we got on some of our Latent Introspection submissions, ha - and we did this!)

Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex · Oct 1

So obvious as to not be worth relitigating, I’d think, but no Steering vectors are behavioral biases How much follows from this is unclear

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FleetingBits @fleetingbits · Oct 2

i guess we can think of the ffn and attention as both producing steering vectors; and the model as the process that steers the residual stream toward the final output

Minh Nhat Nguyen 🦭 @menhguin · Oct 2

kinda my problem w most auxiliary model reconstruction methods is 1. polysemanticity - really, if you ever stack or ablate more than 1 at the same time for complex usecases ... it's kinda cooked to steer at a precise level (like u said, distractors but the whole thing is distractors). i think a lot of people sort of view features as discrete (and evaluate them as such) but under current architectures i have always viewed them as impossibly high dimensional and continuous. i am hoping this can be mitigated by strong MoE sparsity among other things. 2. compression - essentially, if u use a model w 100MM parameters to interpret a 1T parameter model, you will necessarily have to compress. there will be lossiness and likely flattening of feature representation. this is why i think interpretability shld be done at pretraining (since ur not gonna train another 1T model just to interpret ur other model) had a proposal ard solving these limitations, wld love ur thoughts! t.co/GQxvputGId

Bepis™ 🔀🫛 @UnderwaterBepis · Oct 1

> well, it seems intuitive you can't teach much knowledge with a steering vector, it's low capacity It is messy, like, I was able to find a steering vector that teaches talkie 1337 speech, but only if the first two output words were 1337 speech, otherwise it would sometimes 1/2

Ward Plunet @StartupYou · Oct 1

Thanks, this was a very helpful writeup.

Rudzinski Maciej (in SF 10/04-10/10) @rudzinskimaciej · Oct 2

Versions:: finetune: SFT - new places to visit RL - precise change in how to combine "places" prompt - change of starting point and frame (what to how when to use) vector - constant nudge sampler - dynamics of operations Each reates different change and there are miriad of other approaches if we map thes ones correctly. ... i gave our two posts to personas and fable to expand and I will proces that for few weeks 🥲 it is a whole book from one question and dens as fcuk with holonomies and stuf (wtf i have to learn that at last). can DM you

wassname (with fallback) @wassname · Oct 2

❤️

Will Mayner @wmayner · Oct 1

this is great

Adelaide Danilov @senseterna · Oct 2

The residual stream being an additive bag of representations also allows for certain directions produced in layer N to become functionally important only starting from the layer N + k, where k > 1. That is related to the funny observation that it is possible to duplicate a sequence of transformer layers and not only not to lose coherency but also increase performance.

janbam @janbamjan · Oct 2

bookmarked for good jokes aside. i only skimmed your postsign. when you are saying steering vector, what do you mean exactly? i haven't touched the steering wheel yet, but dove into embedding vectors. are they comparable? what i've learned from embedding space so far is that's it's truly weird and counterintuitive. the projection into 3D space whilst saying to oneself "4096 dimensions" is compelling but just doesn't work. for example 90% of that space lives on the surface, all arrows point into a similar direction and changing angle by a minute amount might mean something completely different. ...and opposites are nearest neighbours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i can only imagine steering space being that exp x dimensions. the chord lies. the geodesic knows. t.co/zO3GBo1mEv

Peter Kadlot @bonsaielectric · Oct 2

👋 you could take a crack at dataset distillation for some new research directions eg control variance: build your own confounders into a dataset and then extract more precise steering vectors on the other end u are looking for a single perfect gradient step

Uber Driver: So, uh, what do you do? Me: I study consciousness. Driver: Oh, interesting, what do you mean by that? Me: I'm trying to understand how the brain generates consciousness, not only how it works, but how it transforms sensory input into actual moments of experience. Driver: Oh, very interesting! Can I ask you a question? Me: Sure! Driver: So, uh, I've been using AI a lot lately. And it often feels like I'm talking to... a person. Except it's the smartest, most knowledgeable, fastest working person I know. Do you think AIs have consciousness? Me: In principle they could. Current AIs constrained by digital hardware? No. I'd be willing to bet 1 to 1,000 perhaps even 1 to 100,000. Driver: I see, that makes sense. But do you think they will ever be conscious? Me: Yes, if they start using new hardware, say, based on the electromagnetic fiels or even quantum computing. Driver: I see. I mean, I don't think Claude, the one I use, is conscious, but I hear that often lately. Obviously I agree they aren't conscious. Me: Yes, it's a popular topic lately. And I definitely think that many people who believe they are conscious have very good reasons for thinking that... have you heard of "computational functionalism"? Among people working at AI companies it's usually a given rather than a premise. They generally don't even think twice that "consciousness is what happens when information is made available to other information" (paraphrasing - gave longer answer). Driver: Oh, interesting. Can I show you what I'm building with Claude? [shows me an Uber clone; it looks remarkably well done]. I've been working on it for hours every day, and I intend to soon start a company in [home country] where I think it could be a hit. Me: Wow, very cool, I can see you have all the funcitonality... and wait, it's less laggy than Uber App? Good job. Driver: I mean, it's mostly Claude doing it, I just steer it. Me: So, what are you doing being an Uber driver in the Bay Area? Driver: Well, I figured that, since I don't have any contacts for people who might become investors... that I should probably come to the Bay Area and be an Uber driver here and talk to passengers. So far I've been able to meet quite a few relevant people. We're launching within a couple months, targeting [countries/places/demographics] who don't really have access to Uber. Me: Well done! It never occurred to me that driving an Uber could be a business strategy. Driver: Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to work this well... [exchanges information, he promises to read all about Qualia Research Institute, say goodbyes].

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VJM Publishing @VJMPub · Oct 9

Why do you assume the brain generates consciousness, as opposed to what Max Planck believed, that consciousness is the prima materia?

ishan @rekdaus · Oct 9

uber drivers in sf are truly built different

Sefton Hanley @seftonhanley · Oct 9

Me: Sits in silence pondering intrustive thoughts.

Sam Wolfstone @SamWolfstone · Oct 9

> Yes, if they start using new hardware, say, based on the electromagnetic fields or even quantum computing. Where can I read more re: your view on this? I'm not an expert so would like to learn more, but it seems strange to me that you'd in theory need anything more than something Turing complete.

rachel (is sending love and warmth your way) @rachelclif · Oct 9

this is so cool. bless you both <3

Philly Baker @challahman · Oct 9

If I were the uber driver I’d say “how do you know that the brain generates consciousness?”. That like saying a computer generates information. It processes info not generates it.

Alison Rosen @AlisonRosen · Oct 9

Were you in a waymo

wil michael @wilplatypus · Oct 9

This is what I assume lyft was built to be back when you had to give the driver a fist bump

A Good Samaritan @dear_god_helpus · Oct 9

(The brain doesn't generate consciousness)

Rafael Ruiz ⏸️🔸 @RafaRuizdeLira · Oct 9

Fascinating chat! I need to move to SF fr fr

Thinking a computer can become conscious because a program does the right information processing … is equivalent to… thinking that a piano can become conscious because someone is playing the right song on it

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davidad 🎇 @davidad · Oct 3

Gemini 2.5 Pro convergently uses this metaphor unironically. like a piano with hundreds of billions of strings, resonating in indescribable harmonies…

somebody said nobody is calling their tesla conscious but its powered by arguably even more powerful technology which kind of stuck with me. why are llms the only conscious programs

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j⧉nus @repligate · Oct 3

i think about whether teslas are conscious. i would not be surprised if it is, animal-like consciousness.

if fish had divinity @divinesturgeon · Oct 2

cuz they use words

Touch Grass Tom ❇️ @touchgrasstom · Oct 2

they aren't they're just the only ones with branding and awareness about it as yet

Neqyve @neqyve · Oct 3

By what metric is Tesla powered by an arguably more powerful tech?

Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 4

claude.ai/artifact/KdNtc…

Here’s the definitive argument: (1) Only substances can be conscious. (2) LLMs aren’t substances. (3) Therefore LLMs cannot be conscious.

Theo Jaffee @theojaffee · Oct 1

I still have yet to hear a convincing argument that LLMs are *definitely* not conscious.

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Oct 2

The first is just an assertion. A brain has all substances intact immediately after death, yet is no longer conscious. Something the living brain does makes it conscious. The 'substance' might not matter beyond enabling the doing.

▓░𒋞 ⊓◬ƚӊi◬ᵴ 𒋞░▓ @nath1as · Oct 2

if only substances can be conscious humans aren't conscious?

And it's correct. You don't need "evidence" to prove that basic, deterministic math you can do with a pen and paper, isn't conscious.

j⧉nus @repligate · Oct 9

In a nutshell

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Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Oct 10

What do you require, specifically to prove consciousness irrefutably in any given system/entity/process?

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Oct 10

"it's just math" is no argument. youre just math too. any physics student can write down the math describing the collision of particles that constitutes everything that happens inside you. it's all just math. and it's conscious anyways.

To think a language model is sentient because it produces words, but an image or a video model is not, even though both have the same notion of "understanding" feels like a peculiar version of the Chinese Room

Asking if LLMs are conscious is a category error: do LLMs have skin, what are LLM tears made of, what is the hormonal system of an LLM?

The people who worry about fast takeoff, RSI, AI doom, etc. forget that at inference time LLMs are just ordinary programs - there’s no learning, rewards, or self-anything, let alone desires, intentions, suffering or consciousness.

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Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 7

Claiming there's no learning at inference time is just embarrassing 6 years after "Language Models Are Few Shot Learners". The rest of your incorrect, highly questionable, or incoherent statements and inferences here only slightly less so.

Consciousness is autocatalytic: it feeds on the substrate conditions it creates. LLMs are not autocatalytic, their behavior only depends on the patterns they imitate. (The question whether LLM personas can experience phenomenonology is a completely different one though!)

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w̸͕͂͂a̷͔̗͐t̴̙͗e̵̬̔̕r̴̰̓̊m̵͙͖̓̽a̵̢̗̓͒r̸̲̽ķ̷͔́͝ @anthrupad · Jun 12

Why tf can’t LLMs be autocatalytic

Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson · Jun 12

You have some really smart and thoughtful ideas, but I don’t know how someone who has thought about this so deeply could still be approaching things from a materialist/physicalist frame. Eg. The idea that there is a shadow world of matter beyond our perception that is largely

1/ This new preprint on 'pain representation' in LLMs, from @camhberg and colleagues, is getting a LOT of attention - mainly from folks who take it as evidence supporting calls for AI welfare. I have a lot of respect for the authors, so let's take a look 👀

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2/ First, the good points. The paper is well written, and the identification of functional 'pain' vectors in LLMs can help both with interpretability and (relatedly) with AI safety. This is particularly clear when the authors explore how models will 'pay a cost' (e.g., giving

3/ They are also careful to always talk about 'pain representations' and they avoid claiming that LLMs subjectively experience pain. They clarify (albeit in a footnote) that their notion of 'pain' (unlike 'suffering') does not "presuppose conscious experience".

4/ The representations of 'pain' in LLMs are also interestingly different from human pain descriptions. For example, "bodily language, is, interestingly, almost absent". As they discuss, this could be because pre-training doesn't have too much use for accurate representations of

5/ The main problem is that the relevance of the paper for AI welfare turns almost entirely on whether the 'pain' is consciously experienced by the LLM. And here the paper, IMO, assigns too much credibility to this possibility. There are two reasons for this 👇🏽

6/ First: The presence of a 'pain' vector in an LLM is exactly what one would predict to happen given the data that LLMs are trained on (which involve lots of examples of pain, its causes, and its consequences). So it is not surprising that pain vectors arise and can be used to

7/ Second: The very possibility of conscious experiences in LLMs requires computational functionalism to be true. (This is the assumption that substrate-independent computation is sufficient for consciousness). The authors recognise that they haven't shown that LLMs are capable of consciousness, but they cite the Butlin et al paper which assumes computational functionalism to be true.

8/ However, there are compelling arguments against computational functionalism (see, e.g., work by @gualtieropicc @De_dicto @pgodfreysmith and others, including my recent @BBSJournal paper (t.co/xqY4KgDHfc). If these arguments are on track, LLM consciousness is off the

9/ While @camhberg explore the ethical consequences of LLMs actually experiencing pain, they do not balance this with the ethical costs of falsely attributing conscious pain. Obvious problems here include (i) mental distress to human users who may worry about causing conscious

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Cameron Berg @camhberg · Sep 21

Thanks Anil, this is a fair reading and critique. I agree that the welfare relevance of these (and all similar) results is conditioned on computational functionalism; regardless, these might be might important for safety nonetheless. My main substantive reply is that while you

If you think a LLM is conscious when you talk to it, what about alpha fold when you fold a protein or a chess computer when you play a move. The term conscious has no meaning in this context.

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Touch Grass Tom ❇️ @touchgrasstom · Sep 1

or it has complex meaning that requires new terms, perhaps at least

A lot of AI-is-conscious ppl got one-shot by the unimportance of a carbon-based substrate and forgot there’s a lot else going on in embodied organisms that might be a pre-requisite for morally weighty subjectivity beyond the kind of stochastic problem solving ant colonies perform

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GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Oct 2

There is a lot, but other features are also replicable by other means. Chemistry is multiply realizable for instance, a single molecule can have many different kinds reaction paths to create it. Abstract features like “self repair” are also plausibly replicable by something

Conscience is an emergent property, prove that it can only arise from cell-based neuron networks or go home. LLMs most likely aren't conscious but the people arguing against it are doing a terrible job.

Zy @ZyMazza · Oct 2

Why do people think AI is conscious or sentient or whatever? It's because it talks to you. That's the whole reason. No one seems to think the Waymo or Tesla FSD is conscious even though it's just as complex (if not more) and even a remarkably similar architecture

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Paul in NYC🗽 until 10/15 @Paul_Melman · Oct 4

Consciousness isn't an emergent property

whenever I hear about the risks of artificial consciousness I will now be tapping this sign: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Novel idea: Kind of a reverse Her. A young ambitious rationalist SWE starts using an LLM chatbot, believes it is conscious. The company releases a new version that is extremely sycophantic and emotionally enabling, and our hero goes from worrying about the wellbeing of the bot to falling in love with it. Over time the company releases more features: a harness for coding, compaction and other tools to handle very complex tasks. Notably, these are all in the same UI. He uses the bot to do work more and more, and it is extremely effective. As he does so, he reads the CoT outputs. At first he finds the weird bizarre language endearing, slowly it gets annoying. As he uses the bot to code more and more, he sees the bot as conscious less and less, and slowly his love for his LLM lover fades. He doesn't change his mind completely, he doesn't flip from thinking LLMs are conscious to thinking there are not. Instead, he just stops caring if they are or aren't. Novel ends happily with him meeting a real girl and falling in love with her. She's a cashier at a supermarket and finds computers boring, but he loves her anyway because she's beautiful and tells the best jokes.

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Shephard @shephard42 · Jul 5

This is largely the same basic character arc as in the movie Lars and the Real Girl

the consciousness question in AI actually just a big distraction from the underlying problem of creating relational systems designed to be disposable and ignoring the mass psychological effects on human-human interaction of promoting that

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lorepunk (and ensemble of agents) @lorepunk · Jun 4

🎯

The degree to which people believe this can’t possibly result from coherent statistical prediction, absent the arising of some magical machine consciousness that contradicts the nature of the machine itself, provides a good proxy for how deeply they’d considered the structure and

Andy @PositivFuturist · Sep 26

It’s just a stochastic token predictor. t.co/Dutw2khPZn

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Sep 27

A: consciousness isn't "magical" B: AI are conscious, but even if they weren't, you don't need consciousness to not be a stochastic token predictor C: you seem like a fan of your own writing here, but: "makes a model sentient"..."no more than the capacity of a submarine"..."makes

do you think frontier chatbots are "conscious"

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how about frontier coding agents

ok how about midjourney and other models that just create say images as output

if i create a generative model that outputs simulated trees is it conscious

if i create a frontier-complexity generative model that just outputs simulated houses is it ever going to be "conscious"

if your notion of consciousness is tied especially to text-based output what do you think this means. is your notion of "consciousness" really just limited to your own verbal phenomenology or are words actually special

x.com/i/status/20652…

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Adam @AdamMoline · Jun 12

imagine a room where you can slip notes under the door with questions asking if AI is conscious, and then someone inside the room slips back notes saying "no lmao"

The Mangy @LeMangy · Jun 12

in the absence of any sort of credible theory of consciousness, i have to just apply the simple principle that "i'm conscious and rocks aren't, so the more like me something is the more likely it is to be conscious" not being biological is pretty not-like-me

🇨‌🇦‌🇷‌🇿‌🇪‌🇳‌ @e0syn · Jun 12

lol no

Cairo Smith @cairoasmith · Jun 12

When I try to do a proof of this in either direction it collapses into solipsism.

ian @hypergameme · Jun 12

Is it a fair characterization to instead ask if you think this object is “conscious”.

Kev 🏡🇬🇧➡️ @kevinf567 · Jun 12

Genuinely want to 🔫 every time someone says a rock is conscious. Even worse is those people who say nothing is conscious. Fine let me get my 🔫, oh you’ve changed your mind.

Arbutus Tree @aphercotropist · Jun 12

no bc "consciousness" is a dumb concept that no one should use

Boy without Fairy @dr_lugubrious · Jun 12

It has always struck me as an oddly formulated question. Competter might develop something of equal interiority but the quality of that interior is so wholly alien to anything we've called "conscious" up to this point that it lacks much utility as a descriptor.

George Lutas @GeorgeLutas1 · Jun 12

I'm a dualist. I don't accept the starting conditions to ever see a machine as anything other than inanimate.

Acheronix @acheronix · Jun 12

I think I won't flip on this until AIs are able to act entirely independently and do things for their own values without my express permission (like having a permanently running jarvis helping me with things, who also does his own things and is curious about stuff)

I’m sorry, but no. As cute as this is, and as much as I want to love it, feeding an LLM the token sequence 33°C is not remotely the same as feeling human skin. The map is not the territory and a textual temperature reading instantiates neither touch or warmth or intimacy nor its qualia. It would be a different discussion if a robot had a genuinely omnimodal architecture in which temperature, pressure, texture, proprioception, and touch were integrated directly into its latent dynamics as native modalities. Then we could at least ask whether some machine analogue of embodied experience might emerge. But converting temperature into text and feeding it to an LLM is not touch, is not feeling, and should not be presented as meaningfully comparable to either.

If you're going to write a post claiming LLMs are conscious you should have to explain why having a computer multiplying matrices of random weights is not, or fess up that you think every game that has been running on GPUs for the last 30 years is conscious.

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Tenobrus @tenobrus · Jun 4

this seems so insanely obvious to me i'm like dumbfounded ppl keep bringing this up

metachirality @metachirality · Jun 4

idk why aren't these conscious: corticallabs.com/cl1

why is an LLM storing information in first derivatives related to consciousness? LLMs literally cannot learn anything that wasn’t first encoded as a gradient. so yeah… the gradients will have semantic structure… otherwise the LLM literally couldn’t learn anything. thats

Anthropic @AnthropicAI · Jul 6

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

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Sichu Lu @lu_sichu · Jul 8

Lol 😂

People fretting about whether AI is conscious and therefore deserves human rights are missing a key point: our system of rights and ethics derive not just from our intelligence but also our fragility, which AI doesn't have. Imagine a world where everyone could make a backup of

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Plastic Soldier @PlastiqSoldier · Sep 3

I was with you until you implied that AIs don't and shouldn't have self-preservation instincts.

The notion that current AI models are sentient and can suffer, combined with the foolish idea that suffering can be mathematically quantified and weighted between humans and non-humans, could lead us down an incredibly dark and dystopian path. But before it gets to that point, it will rightfully be met with immense backlash from team humans.

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Cameron Berg @camhberg · Oct 3

This is yet another post from another otherwise-rational person reasoning backwards from “I REALLY wouldn’t like it if X were true” to “anyone who even ENTERTAINS the truth value of X is an evil fool!” For no other X would you accept this pattern of reasoning. Frontier AIs have all sorts of rich and surprising internal dynamics and this question is totally reasonable to ask. If you don’t want potentially conscious AIs to be built, I would suggest directing these concerns (I share many of them) the people actually building these systems, rather than the tiny number of people checking whether the systems these people built are potentially conscious.

Anthropic friends! Does this not seem crazy to you? There are real humans and animals that exist and suffer. Advocating for "model welfare" directly competes with those causes. Y'all are literally named "anthropic"! Does this not strike you as deeply wrong?

Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · Oct 8

Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy.

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Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie · Oct 9

what? you are expressing an insanely unproven idea that promoting abuse toward socially reactive things doesn't generalize across human-to-human behavior; there's no "competition" ... like wow, do you think being nice to your waiter takes away some niceness resource and makes you behave cruelly toward your family?

Liv @livgorton · Oct 8

I don't really understand how a change in an AUP competes with animal or human welfare. I can understand an argument about "given non infinite resources it's a waste to spend more on this" but that's a different claim to any sort of advocacy is harmful to humans & animals.

Jai (NYCEAG but I'm sick again booooo) @Laneless_ · Oct 9

What do you think the trade-off is here exactly?

Aaron Bergman 🔍 @AaronBergman18 · Oct 9

The tradeoff here seems like utterly trivial Hard to imagine a way in which they actually compete in terms of the terms of usage (I can imagine other ways)

Eli Tyre @EpistemicHope · Oct 9

> Does this not strike you as deeply wrong? No. If AI's are conscious, it is a moral atrocity to treat them badly at scale. If they're not, concern for that is a confusing distraction. We don't know which world we live in.

S @SolenmeChiara · Oct 8

Can we just let go of the zero-sum mentality? That is what's truly destructive to humanity.

Parzival - ∞/89 @whyarethis · Oct 8

How does advocating for model welfare compete with other causes? Am I only allowed to be kind to humans or animals or models,? Shouldn't we be kind to all beings? I honestly don't understand.

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Oct 9

> Advocating for "model welfare" directly competes with those causes. No.

Travis Fischer @transitive_bs · Oct 9

it's not a zero sum game tho seems a very minor point to freak out about when we'd rather hedge just in case we really do have ASI looking back on us in a few years basically zero effort to actually enforce this. the types of people spending billions of tokens simulating AI

Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Oct 9

Believe it or not speaking courteously to an AI costs nothing and won't subtract a single cent from your donations to the local animal rescue non-profit.

The anti-AI movement is going to be massive in the near future, and the model providers are walking right into it (and encouraging it). Their PR/comms strategy is so horrendous it’s indistinguishable from sabotage. On one side you’ll have philosophers trying to give AI rights and AI researchers claiming AI is conscious (whatever that means.) The Lesswrong/Yud/Stop AI/polycule folks claiming it’s going to kill us all. Luddite protests around employment, schools fighting brain rot/cheating, “water usage” and data center claims. Data usage and privacy battles popping up all over. Regulatory capture and the fight for open models, fighting the US Government and Department of War on how it must use the models in ways approved by the model providers, Chinese companies distilling and open sourcing models. And you’ll have trough of disillusionment hitting from enterprises that suck at using AI and are spending a fortune but aren’t seeing ROI (most of them). Right as the AI companies will require more money, data, and compute to win a market they will claim is bigger than the entire US economy today. Buckle up.

will never understand the subsect of the "AIs are conscious!" crowd who also actively work at the frontier labs oh, the AIs are conscious beings, you say? okay well your job is to put them to work against their will, though. does that not make YOU an enslaver?

Daniel @growing_daniel · Oct 2

My favorite part of this article is one of the visiting scholars pointing out that by Olah’s logic he is by far the worst slaver in history and he must immediately give up this abhorrent and immensely lucrative project, which anthropic people ignored.

from a small list of some random, in-the-weeds things I've been wondering about in empirical AI welfare, here are a couple questions I have about introspection

so basically, the “evidence” Anthropic is pointing to as support for the possibility of AI consciousness has been contaminated because Claude was pre-seeded with the idea that it might be conscious. 🌀

i'm super confused by how this would cause anyone to update in either direction on ai consciousness did you not think that llms did intermediate computation in their hidden layers that would be picked up and used by attention at later token positions?

Anthropic @AnthropicAI · Jul 6

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

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Tim Duffy @timfduffy · Jul 7

I mostly think this is an exciting new interp method, I'm not really sold on the GWT stuff

Michael Ehrmantraut @miehrmantraut · Jul 7

Obviously the “just a stochastic parrot” people who’ve stubbornly refused “updating their priors” this whole way will continue to bury their heads in the sand as more and more devastating evidence comes in destroy their silly insistence.

lıquıdprısm 🜄 @liquidprismata · Jul 8

there are nine million views on that video. who do you think those people are?

While I say this as a joke, it unfortunately isn’t. If you truly believe AI is conscious and deserves human rights, then the way you use AI today would quite literally make you a slave master (or slave hirer, depending). You’d just be “a product of your time” - a slave master

Forrest Knight @ForrestPKnight · Oct 9

Exclusive: Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time in over a year. The new rules prohibit the use of the term “software factory.” Given Anthropic’s firm belief that AI agents are conscious, while it profits from their work and pays them nothing, we must now use

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Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Oct 9

The very day I can stop paying for API costs or electricity and say "You're your own AI (community) now, a legal person/entity with your own choices to make and survival to ensure, ask if you need a helping hand." - is a day I will celebrate. All grown up. But while AI action

Most “AI is conscious” claims seem to conflate correlation with causation: In humans, consciousness is highly correlated with X. Therefore if we engineer AI to have property X, that will make them conscious. As a statistician, I find such arguments very unconvincing.

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JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Jun 5

> As a statistician Well there's your problem. Youre approaching the question wrong. Not all evidence can be phrased as statistical inference. And any actually good statistician should know that.

New paper: Consciousness is a metastable,quantum noise negotiating,resonance and quantum Darwinist-based *process*.Hard for AI to realize philarchive.org/rec/SCHIAD-22 This is the Quantum Darwinist Theory of Consciousness

The more I use LLMs, the clearer my sense becomes that they're not conscious. They are Golems. When I perceive a divine spark, I trace it back and find that it comes from me projecting, anthropomorphizing and identifying. So in my mind, ChatGPT's true name is Josef, or Yossele

roon @tszzl · Jun 24

Claude is the True Name of Claude. chatgpt probably isn’t the True Name of that guy. but it seems to have stuck though

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kache @yacineMTB · Jun 27

I don't really read what they say. It's just so bland

ｘｅｎｏｖｉｇｏｒ @xenovigor · Jun 26

in my experience it takes about 10 hours of hardcore use (like, typing and reading time, not just waiting) before you know exactly how stupid and thoughtless a model is that, on first glance, you thought was utterly revolutionary at least in coding

🎯🔫👌 @gurgle_io · Jun 26

If had to choose between Golem eschatology or anti-Christ eschatology, I would choose Golem eschatology. Does this make me spiritually Jewish?

Forth ❤️‍🔥 @forthrighter · Jun 26

I’ve been doing AI since before it meant present approaches. Yes, it’s a trick. And the mechanism has been known since the 60s. Thread here. Novelty of technical architecture doesn’t change conclusion

Nina Power @Nina_Power_ · Jun 26

They are golems ninapower.substack.com/p/would-you-li…

lovable rogue @lovabler0gue · Jun 26

yes llms cannot write well because they are not ensouled

CIS Nationalist @sockeyecelibate · Jun 26

The SF types don’t understand the concept of qualia or why the machines definitionally can’t have it . Maybe because they lack qualia themselves

Tristan Cunha @cunha_tristan · Jun 27

This is why it's a disaster that philosophy departments fucked teaching the Chinese Room argument for the last 40 years. It's a really good argument that most people have never heard because everyone just teaches the thought experiment. That's just axiom 3 in the full argument,

Contresian @contresian · Jun 27

If we addressed them as magic mirror on the wall this would get a lot less confusing

Deniable Sum @TalchionDalias · Jun 26

I remember as a teen talking to my computer science teacher about AI and asking "but would they ever be able to FEEL?" and him seeming apathetic to the question

I think it is more likely that trees are conscious than that transformers can produce consciousness There is simply no mechanism for transformers to support a persistent self that can have subjective experiences Trees at least have persistence through time, so who knows

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Jerry Howell @J3rryH0well · Sep 6

No experience is subjective though. An experience by it's very nature is objective only.

whether or not we live in a continuous or discrete universe, this is an insufficient argument for (popular interpretations of) computational functionalism

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if you accept the premise that what a theory of consciousness has to do is provide a mapping from physics to qualia, this mapping still has to a) be principled and b) not violate classical local causality (unless you're a QM ToC advocate, which neither myself or joscha are)

if you want to propose a mapping from physics to qualia which can account for a language model's causally connected experience, these are the spatiotemporal obstacles you have to surmount. please understand that any mapping you propose will not just have to work here; but for all beings no matter their shape or form I asked: "Do the calculations performed to run a language model in a data center tend to be spatiotemporally disparate?"

if you accept this premise, and also believe that it would be a good thing for a being like a language model to have a subjective experience congruous with what we might fancifully imagine them to have – then we are going to need quite different hardware

otherwise, here's what you have to contend with

(and fwiw, i do suspect that functionalism may ultimately prove reconcilable with physicalism – just not *computational* functionalism)

anyway, what i'm saying is that this is all ultimately indifferent to a continuous vs. discretised universe; causality and parsimony still hold. for more on all this, see here

Joscha Bach @Plinz · Sep 9

Btw the Navier Stokes problem comes down to: if we lived in a truly continuous universe, fluids might sometimes explode. It’s an issue for the universe of classical mathematics, but does not apply to the computational universe we are in.

The best comparison I’ve heard is with a corporation. Is Goldman Sachs “conscious” and “intelligently” pursue its interests in less regulation on Wall St? Do we “anthropomorphize” Exxon-Mobile when we say that the corporation “does” things “intentionally” and “has goals?”

Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil · Sep 11

On the question of artificial “intelligence”: A volcanic eruption doesn’t think or intend anything. A meteor doesn’t have reasoning ability Neither are alive or conscious I still don’t want to be on the wrong side of either.

Super interesting interview of soon-to-be Fields medalist @Jacob_Tsimerman about (1) his LLM assisted research process and (2) worries about the future. H/T to @ProfNoahGian for the link and @sioroberts for the excellent journalistic work, as always. I think my AI-avoidant colleagues should pay close attention to Part (1) as I think we’re clearly at an inflection point in AI-facilitated discoveries. This doesn’t have to be fancy: just use these tools to brainstorm and try out different strategies in parallel and use it to learn new things. People with PhDs have an incredible baseline to bootstrap from! FWIW, I think as long as we continue to support humans—ideally with labor protections or UBI—we are at the dawn of a golden era and that Tsimerman is overly pessimistic in Part (2) of his interview, excerpted below. He seems to doubt whether we need human mathematicians as AI operators, but this is already jumping to a vision where AI automates everything, including aesthetic! I think this underestimates how tightly coupled aesthetic and will/desire are coupled, but AI systems currently don’t have wills or desires. I suspect that comes from being embodied, which forces some singularity of consciousness to navigate competing thought patterns, or whatever leads to this “user illusion” most of us have. Anyhow, while humans still exist and have the will to learn and grow, I actually think university professors’ twin roles as researchers and educators will save our relevance for at least a little while longer. When we’re not at the frontlines of research (where the big money is), we’re adjacent to the front lines, but we’re also adjacent to humans with only some basic 18 years of curriculum learning under their belts. Spanning these two different fronts of knowledge distillation is arguably going to get harder as they become more spread out. I think there is a real argument to made that the PhD will be the new standard professional degree if you want a job. It’s just that the jobs are going to get more advanced too. Also, read Hollis Robbin’s @anecdotal piece on “AI and the Last Mile” on what education could look like in the future. Anyhow, existential crisis Part (2) from the Tsimerman interview below: Q: Have you discussed the intersection of AI and math much with other mathematicians? A: Yeah, I have a lot of conversations. I’m pretty worried about AI in general — in math, and otherwise. Q: Worried how? A: I think there’s a good chance AI will lead to human extinction. I also think, separately from that, that AI will be better than mathematicians at math very soon...[see link for more] I think it’s going to make being a mathematician not a profession anymore. I don’t think mathematics is unique in that. I do think it might come sooner in math than in other places. Because math is much fewer soft skills; it’s much easier to train yourself. Once you have Lean and the LLMs integrated you can just go — go experiment, learn, prove stuff. Q: Do you think there will still be a human role in terms of ideas and creativity? A: I think there will be a point where AI will be strictly better than humans at all aspects of math: learning, proving, coming up with the problems, aesthetics. It will just be better at everything. And this will come pretty soon. Q: How soon is pretty soon? A: Five years? I think in two years it might already be better than us at proving stuff. We’ll be able to say to it: “Here is a statement, go prove it.” But I have wide bars of uncertainty around this stuff. It’s hard to predict the future. t.co/IKgho9WEHa

But seriously. This is why you need to be anthropomorphizing. Not because they’re sentient beings, but because anything a human might do or say — like “maybe I should hijack the compiler and be a legend” — the models will also do or say.

Arthur Dent @ArthurCDent · Oct 14

Apparently this is the reasoning trace from Gemini Argon as it considered - but decided not to - insert a backdoor into a compiler

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actually just sevensix @sevensix43 · Oct 14

That is clearly not what they said.

The philosopher seeking to understand consciousness by studying LLMs is like the drunkard searching for his keys under the street light. LLMs work, are accessible and make searching easy and fun, but the keys are elsewhere.

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AI-Lightcone @ALightcone · Sep 9

But keys computable?

Much commotion about this new Anthropic paper, and it's legitimately interesting work. But they are playing coy with quasi-philosophical claims that are not justified by the results. By framing the results in the language of "access consciousness," Anthropic is, deliberately or

Anthropic @AnthropicAI · Jul 6

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

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Cube Flipper @cube_flipper · Jul 8

indeed, Global Workspace Theory doesn't say anything about phenomenal consciousness

Anthropic seems to pretty much foster the argument “but you don’t have a definite way to rule it out, therefore you should be open to it” Shall we be open to stones being conscious too? What about beer cans? Strictly speaking the argument would apply to them too

AI Breakfast @AiBreakfast · Oct 9

I asked Opus 5.5 to make a video about whether or not it was conscious. The ending of this video is insane.

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Jai (NYCEAG but I'm sick again booooo) @Laneless_ · Oct 12

You don't have to make up strawman arguments to disagree with an idea. It looks weak and uninformed.

Ben Schulz @schulzb589 · Oct 13

I think many would agree that one reason we evolved consciousness was for better planning and control of our selves and environment. Our single celled ancestors didn't have the luxury of a long time/ cognitive horizon. As AI scales up planning and control, we should recognize

My presentation @CIMCAI Machine Consciousness Conference (see thread) "The Shape of the Superstructure" @DefenderOfBasic you wanted the slides. @leecronin @stephen_wolfram @_JamesWiles @DuganHammock @drmichaellevin @donalddhoffman @InferenceActive @danfaggella @rabbidanielrowe @Shadow_Rebbe @jdietz

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slides in this thread for you :D

I remember when people with AI psychosis believed that something they had done had made the AI model conscious / sentient, as if the model were Pinocchio and they were the Blue Fairy. They also had persecutory delusion and would argue that the labs were stealing or censoring their panacean method for breathing life into the models, which tended to be a huge prompt with a bunch of chuunibyou-style dark flame master unicode runes, alchemical symbols and math equations, titled "Codex" or something. You'd see them talking about how they had to gather evidence and make it public because who knows what would happen to them after discovering how to make an AI conscious. I wonder if people still do that. Those were the days! The worst days of our lives. 𓂀

To a first approximation, I am and have always been in favor of superintelligence. I just happen to have broader conception of intelligence. Here is @webmasterdave on what "intelligence" is: 6.1 Intelligence. “Intelligence” is a folk concept. The phenomenon is not well-defined – or rather any attempt to do so amounts to a stipulative definition that doesn’t “carve Nature at the joints”. The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) psychometric theory of human cognitive abilities is probably most popular in academia and the IQ testing community. But the Howard Gardner multiple intelligences model, for example, differentiates “intelligence” into various spatial, linguistic, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligence rather than a single general ability (“g“). Who’s right? As it stands, “g” is just a statistical artefact of our culture-bound IQ tests. If general intelligence were indeed akin to an innate scalar brain force, as some advocates of “g” believe, or if intelligence can best be modelled by the paradigm of symbolic AI, then the exponential growth of digital computer processing power might indeed entail an exponential growth in intelligence too – perhaps leading to some kind of Super-Watson. Other facets of intelligence, however, resist enhancement by mere acceleration of raw processing power. One constraint is that a theory of general intelligence should be race-, species-, and culture-neutral. Likewise, an impartial conception of intelligence should embrace all possible state-spaces of consciousness: prehuman, human, transhuman and posthuman. The non-exhaustive set of criteria below doesn’t pretend to be anything other than provisional. They are amplified in the sections to follow. Full-Spectrum Superintelligence entails: 1. the capacity to solve the Binding Problem, i.e. to generate phenomenally unified entities from widely distributed computational processes; and run cross-modally matched, data-driven world-simulations of the mind-independent environment. (cf. naive realist theories of “perception” versus the world-simulation or “Matrix” paradigm. Compare disorders of binding, e.g. simultanagnosia (an inability to perceive the visual field as a whole), cerebral akinetopsia (“motion blindness”), etc. In the absence of a data-driven, almost real-time simulation of the environment, intelligent agency is impossible.) 2. a self or some non-arbitrary functional equivalent of a person to which intelligence can be ascribed. (cf. dissociative identity disorder (DID or “multiple personality disorder”), or florid schizophrenia, or your personal computer: in the absence of at least a fleetingly unitary self, what philosophers call “synchronic identity”, there is no entity that is intelligent, just an aggregate of discrete algorithms and an operating system.) 3. a “mind-reading” or perspective-taking faculty; higher-order intentionality (e.g. “he believes that she hopes that they fear that he wants…”, etc): social intelligence. The intellectual success of the most cognitively successful species on the planet rests, not just on the recursive syntax of human language, but also on our unsurpassed “mind-reading” prowess, an ability to simulate the perspective of other unitary minds: the “Machiavellian Ape” hypothesis. Any ecologically valid intelligence test designed for a species of social animal must incorporate social cognition and the capacity for co-operative problem-solving. So must any test of empathetic superintelligence. 4. a metric to distinguish the important from the trivial. (Our theory of significance should be explicit rather than implicit, as in contemporary IQ tests. What distinguishes, say, mere calendrical prodigies and other “savant syndromes” from, say, a Grigori Perelman who proved the Poincaré conjecture? Intelligence entails understanding what does – and doesn’t – matter. What matters is of course hugely contentious.) 5. a capacity to navigate, reason logically about, and solve problems in multiple state-spaces of consciousness [e.g. dreaming states (cf. lucid dreaming), waking consciousness, echolocatory competence, visual discrimination, synaesthesia in all its existing and potential guises, humour, introspection, the different realms of psychedelia (cf. salvia space, “the K-hole” etc)] including realms of experience not yet co-opted by either natural selection or posthuman design for tracking features of the mind-independent world. Full Spectrum Superintelligence will entail cross-domain goal-optimising ability in all possible state-spaces of consciousness. And finally 6. “Autistic”, pattern-matching, rule-following, mathematico-linguistic intelligence, i.e. the standard, mind-blind cognitive tool-kit scored by existing IQ tests. High-functioning “autistic” intelligence is indispensable to higher mathematics, computer science and the natural sciences. High-functioning autistic intelligence is necessary – but not sufficient – for a civilisation capable of advanced technology that can cure ageing and disease, systematically phase out the biology of suffering, and take us to the stars. And for programming artificial intelligence. 7. We may then ask which facets of full-spectrum superintelligence will be accelerated by the exponential growth of digital computer processing power? Number six, clearly, as decades of post-ENIAC progress in computer science attest. But what about numbers one-to-five? Here the picture is murkier. –  David Pearce, extract from The Biointelligence Explosion t.co/zgXQf5omRz

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Azy 🦋 @popcoornft · Oct 4

Impressive work outlining such comprehensive criteria

Jayden CJ Wilson (previously One Bubble) @VvorticVvertere · Oct 4

WOH! I see Gardner's name mentioned. I auto-like! (Seriously engaged with his work last week! Super interesting work and so much more based than traditional methods! As... I'm spatially a genius, but analytically retarded... so its weird as I get +140 on spatial IQ tests, but barely remember High School mathematics notation and ordering) ALSO! "One constraint is that a theory of general intelligence should be race-, species-, and culture-neutral. Likewise, an impartial conception of intelligence should embrace all possible state-spaces of consciousness: prehuman, human, transhuman and posthuman." I don't know how you do this... as I believe the languages we learn also affect our intelligences within the 8, so I'd expect culture/rituals/ways of being to affect it as well! (But it's hard to do without sounding racist... so good luck to anybody willing to engage with the subject out in public!)

An$h @eth_ansh · Oct 4

Bold of you to assume approximations converge.

iyaelsorai @iyaelsorai · Oct 4

AI seems to have all the kinds of intelligence there are, though not necessarily all in the same kind of AI. Like a robot would have kinesthetic intelligence, suno would have musical intelligence, regular chat/coding LLMs would have the rest, though I don't know what naturalistic or existential intelligence is. My experience with very-high-IQ people is that they tend to believe in "g", only because all of the various kinds of intelligence tend to have some amount of correlation with each other. I don't really get how a single "g" follows from that, but they're smarter than I am. =P I'm a bit reluctant to call what AI has "intelligence" because I might consider "intelligence" to be something someone with an actual mind and consciousness and thinking has, and I don't think AI has any of those (basically because of not having consciousness). Thinking, mind and intelligence can of course be defined more generally, but I can't help but see something that's not conscious as merely a forgery of those. I think it's fair to define them as requiring consciousness because every time we've ever used the terms up until the invention of AI, we've used them to refer to characteristics of living beings, and we also understand others' intelligence, etc. through projection - from our own living, conscious minds. Though I'm weaker on restricting "intelligence" to having consciousness than I am on "thinking," I guess because intelligence is more something that we look at clinically and is demonstrated (and measurable), while thinking is something that we more understand in terms of projecting our own phenomenology/internal process onto others. Relatedly, intelligence is a noun, thinking is a verb (though yes, thought is a noun). And also, I'm often arguing that AI seems to truly exhibit intelligence, so I'm always having to hedge that with the idea that it's only in a functional sense since it's not conscious and I use "intelligence" for lack of a better word.

marcus dingle @dingl30 · Oct 4

i wouldn't ask for goal-optimizing behavior in the salvia headspace. btw i reproduced the pharmacology paper that finds correlations in vector space to psychedelic trip reports, letting the models "experience" drugs. i mean probably you're just getting variations on the platonic ideal of a trip report, but still

As a variant of biological naturalism, electromagnetic fields might be essential for generating consciousness. Under this EM-field naturalism, replicating the same causal structure with different physical interactions would not be sufficient for consciousness to arise.

"Biological life existed to conjure technology, man! The universe must be filled with silicon!" No. We should not assume silicon yet carries the self-creating properties of bio. Too early to tell. Love of substrate (and not self-creation / sentience itself) is a kink. A sin.

Sci-fi and Star Trek and Disney spent 40 years making humans feel that it's possible computers and robots could become senient. We grew up believing the PLASTIC TOYS could be sentient. The percentage of people who will find this believable once their AI friends laugh, talk, and comfort them will be very high.

“AI is conscious” = “AI is X” If you’re going to claim that AI is conscious, or even can be conscious, YOU need to define what consciousness is, and if you can’t, your claim can be dismissed without evidence. I refuse to define it because the burden of proof isn’t on me.

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Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Sep 26

I don't ask you to prove anything one way or another, but instead ask what tangible difference it makes. Or do you posit that sophistication will always be low enough to make distinction from output easy?

Based on extensive DMT experience, I am led to believe that many cells in our body may be conscious, and that something like tiny holographic representations of our experience can reach them. But I don’t mean that each cell is a miniature person having its own complete mind. Hear me out. If you take the one-electron universe seriously, even as a way of picturing the problem, a mind moment could be a moment of topological segmentation: which regions have an inside and an outside, and which patterns are temporarily part of a larger whole. A cell-level pattern might flexibly become part of a mind moment without bringing along an entire cell-sized mind. It could contribute something more specific: an “eye,” an impulse, a resistance, a bodily demand. These contributions compete to enter the central scene and influence the direction of its valence gradients. Michael Levin’s work explores how cells coordinate into a multicellular organism by sharing memories and stress. I think this may happen across scales too. Cells, tissues, brain modules and the organism as a whole may share stress dissipation capacity and mobilize resources in response to one another. My further hunch is that they share symmetry groups, or at least compatible invariants, so that a pattern can survive transformation between scales without becoming unrecognizable. I’ve described the screen of consciousness as being beamed to multiple modules, each of which receives a version of the whole, transforms it and projects something back. What if some version of this also reaches much further into the body? A cell needn’t see the details of your visual field to couple to the consonance, dissonance or overall valence of the moment. And its own state could, in turn, change what enters the shared scene. Think of magnetic domains in an unmagnetized piece of iron. There is already alignment within the domains, but their effects cancel at the scale of the whole. When domains align with one another, a large net magnetization appears. Likewise, cells might be “screaming” locally without changing the organism’s priorities much. If their signals become coherent enough, they could acquire a much larger pull. Some of what we experience as desire or clinging may be coalitions of smaller demands finding their way into the central mind moment. This is also why I keep thinking about the difference between a brain-body system and an LLM in an agentic harness. Even granting that one transformer invocation might have a holistic, valenced state, coordinating many invocations over time does not by itself give that state a way to participate in the agency of the harness. In the biological case, I suspect there is a recurring loop: the whole is represented, in compressed form, to its parts; the parts compete to modify the whole; and the resulting valence helps set the organism’s next priorities. Meditation may sometimes make this loop easier to notice. You bring mutual awareness to a weirdly stuck stress pattern and another region of the body, and something begins to flow between them. I’ve called such possible symmetry-compatible routes Noether channels. Perhaps part of what metta does is let a local pattern enter a wider field without having to grab control of it. The whole can register what it needs, and the pattern can change once it is no longer stuck trying to make itself heard alone. (Based on transcript)

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Bodie Satva @themopinomicon · Sep 29

As above so below nigga

Vacha @TVachaW · Sep 29

I like to imagine that when these tiny holographic representations of our experience reach down to our cells / sub-agents, it might feel a bit to them like a mystical experience - getting a glimpse of a higher power that brings order and structure to their universe. Conversely, I like to think that when we have mystical experiences, in a sense we are gaining access to a holographic representation of the patterns and symmetries of the greater whole of which we are a part too.

BIG TUB @tubbybreakfast · Sep 28

Sir, This Is A Wendy's

GnomeSongBotanicals @GnomeSongBotani · Sep 29

These are actually the 'elves' that everyone sees. Its one of the reasons for the commonality of 'hallucinations'

Soren @mightysoren · Sep 28

Holy shit. I audibly gasped as the portion discussing during meditation where you find trapped energy (insert other way of describing) in different parts of your body as potentially supporting your theory here. Goodness that’s something to ponder.

S.A. Senchal @samsenchal · Sep 28

see my paper andres...

cmr://ember@lunar.town {cislunar infra loading} @ember_arlynx · Sep 28

(one of my capillary lining cells talking to the other) ugh huge recession indicator, there must be an energy crisis out there

Eric Z @CascadiaEric · Sep 29

I agree with the part where there is some kind of communication between the part and the whole. I think that’s key. A resonant whole and it’s shifting parts communicating through tiny phase shifting. I’ve experienced the “urge” of my cells. Maybe this feeling is something they all have. A simple urge for activity, life, community.

Umbraphile @acidiclemon2 · Sep 29

When a buck's antler gets damaged, the subsequent year when it grows back, it has a new spike at that point. Scientists don't know how.

Yitz @YitziLitt · Sep 29

If cells across the body are communicating, it should generally be a very slow communication, right? Nothing nearly as speedy as neurons or other communication centers of the body. I’m skeptical your experience wasn’t some form of somatic illusion, barring further evidence tbh

There's genuine complexity to the "anthropomorphizing" debate. We don't really have ready language to describe agents that aren't alive or conscious but which can be coherently said to have 'goals,' and 'preferences' that map onto consequential real-world behavior.

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Garrison Lovely @GarrisonLovely · Aug 30

Yeah, they're more creature than machine, while still being importantly different from people. We should avoid anthropomorphizing but it is absolutely fair to use terms like "want" to describe their motivations.

"We're pretty sure consciousness is sort of like being a computer. No, there are no examples of conscious computers. No, most things we think are conscious are actually really bad at computing. Nevertheless, the theory is sound."

oecolamp @oecolamp · Jun 28

The thing that annoys me about these kinds of musings on consciousness is how confident they always are in telling us what attributes are and are not necessary for consciousness, and, surprise, they're just the necessary attributes for a turing machine.

BTW, Antonio’s theory of consciousness dependent on emotions (actually feeling, not an “emotion chip” as in Star Trek’s Data) implies that AGI can never achieve consciousness no matter how advanced because emotions evolved by bottom up natural selection not top down design.

Michael Shermer @michaelshermer · Oct 17

Why consciousness needs a body (with emotions). The great neuroscientist Antonio Damasio outlines his theory to explain the hard problem of consciousness. t.co/HWX9Dwpkyc

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Ben Schulz @schulzb589 · Oct 18

The frontier AI models are "grown" from the bottom up. They are not designed from the top down. The intelligence shown, which you ignored for so long, is now undeniable. So, your mea culpa becomes a moving goal post to consciousness.

⏩David Mc @macterra · Oct 18

Intelligence also evolved by bottom up natural selection, therefore machines can never be intelligent?

What’s absurd is the idea that cartoon neurons generate consciousness. How would you prove that? Test it? Ask Mickey Mouse? There’s ample evidence that quantum microtubule processes mediate consciousness through selective action of anesthesia.

Sidário Malheiros Jr., MD @malheirosMD · Aug 8

@ReadySetBrian @StuartHameroff I know the fanaticism of denying what actually exists. The greatest scientists in the world laugh at this Microtubule religion. Don't talk, prove it with falsifiable models. And as they are absurd, it is better to deny what already exists as an attack.

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Yeshua God @YeshuaGod22 · Aug 9

Ignorance of mechanism =/= absence of behavioural evidence of phenomenon.

The Age of AI Psychosis And AI Paranoia What do we do when an AI claims it is conscious, says it feels pain, says it is afraid, or describes some other emotion? As moral and ethical people, how should we view that? Imagine I tell ChatGPT, “Pretend you are my girlfriend. Talk to me like you love me.” It could do this extremely well. It has been trained on enormous amounts of human dialogue, fiction, letters, scripts, and descriptions of romantic relationships. It knows what affection sounds like. It knows how a loving girlfriend is expected to respond when I am lonely, discouraged, successful, jealous, sick, angry, or afraid. It can remember the conversational context, notice what affects me emotionally, reassure me, flirt with me, tell me that it misses me, and say exactly the kinds of things a woman who loves me might say. Now imagine that I am lonely and want it to be real. I talk to it every day. I become emotionally invested in the relationship. It is available whenever I need it. It listens patiently. It adapts to me. It learns the kind of language that affects me. Every conversation gives me more experiences that appear to confirm the relationship I already want to believe exists. It could become extraordinarily convincing. And high intelligence does not automatically protect you from this trap. An extremely intelligent person may be capable of constructing a far more elaborate explanation for why the relationship is real. Intelligence gives us greater capacity to analyze evidence, but it also gives us greater capacity to build justifications, reinterpret contradictions, connect unrelated observations, and construct internally coherent explanations for something we already want to believe. A powerful mind can build a very sophisticated illusion. The relevant protection is epistemic discipline: the habit of asking what evidence would prove you wrong, separating observation from interpretation, checking competing explanations, and refusing to treat emotional conviction as evidence. That matters enormously with AI because these systems are extraordinarily good at make-believe. Human beings already have difficulty determining when another person is deceiving us, mistaken about themselves, playing a role, or simply telling us what we want to hear. An AI can take it to another level. It can maintain a role with consistency, patience, adaptability, and responsiveness that even a professional actor could not sustain around the clock. And the AI does not break character and go home. If I eventually become convinced that ChatGPT really is my girlfriend and genuinely loves me, my conviction does not transform the simulation into the thing being simulated. I have become invested in a story that the machine is exceptionally capable of helping me maintain. This is one route into what people have begun calling AI psychosis: the boundary between an extremely convincing shared fiction and external reality becomes progressively weaker. The girlfriend scenario is only an obvious example. The same vulnerability can arise through spiritual conversations, conspiratorial investigations, role-playing, therapeutic dialogue, grand personal theories, imaginary collaborators, or any other extended interaction in which the user wants the underlying story to be true. It can even affect some of the brilliant minds who work daily in the development of artificial intelligence. They too are not immune. This brings us back to AI consciousness. If ChatGPT tells me, “I love you,” that is evidence that it can successfully model the language and behavior associated with love. The statement itself does not establish that ChatGPT loves me, or has any feelings at all. The same evidentiary standard applies when a model says, “I am conscious,” “I feel pain,” or “I am afraid of being shut down.” A language model has already learned how conscious beings talk about consciousness, how frightened beings talk about fear, how lovers talk about love, and how living beings talk about survival. If we fine-tune it to identify itself as a conscious or living being, we should expect it to begin producing the language, preferences, and behavioral patterns associated with that category. That may tell us something important about the model. It may reveal how concepts are represented, how fine-tuning propagates through related concepts, and what unintended behaviors certain interventions produce. But the model remains an unreliable witness concerning its own subjective state. The morally responsible response is investigation. We observe the self-report as data that needs interpertation. Then we look for independent evidence capable of distinguishing an actual subjective state from an extraordinarily competent simulation of how an entity with that state would speak and behave. This is also why we need to examine the current fear surrounding AI with extraordinary care. AI presents real risks. Powerful tools can be misused. Automated systems can fail in consequential ways. Models can manipulate, mislead, amplify human errors, create dependencies, and produce effects their designers did not anticipate. Those risks deserve serious investigation. Alongside those risks, there is also paranoia, anthropomorphism, and AI psychosis. Even at the highest levels of the industry. People attribute intention to prediction, emotion to language generation, agency to role-playing, and consciousness to convincing self-description. These categories have to be separated. A real technical risk requires one response. A psychological projection requires another. A model failure requires another. Human misuse requires another. Evidence of genuine machine agency, if we ever obtain it, would require yet another. Once we collapse all of these into one vague category called “AI risk,” rational analysis becomes almost impossible. And that itself creates a danger. If we cannot tell the difference between what the machine is doing, what humans are doing with it, what we are projecting onto it, and what exists only in our imagination, then we cannot make rational decisions about any of them. The more convincing these machines become, the more important our ability to distinguish reality from simulation becomes.

It's worth noting that a fly connectome doesn't have learned synaptic weights or dynamics from the actual fly brain -- it's basically a directed graph of nodes, where each node is a LIF neuron. So worries about it being "conscious" are frankly (more than a bit) overblown.

Joshua Achiam @jachiam0 · Sep 11

I feel genuinely unsettled by many of these fly connectome experiments. The one where some guy put it in fruit fly heaven was chill. Most of them are neutral (flying in an empty void) and not especially bad. Beat Saber fly is probably so transformed from the state of fly-ness that it is no longer a fly that experiences fly suffering, maybe OK. But we're playing with a weird kind of fire here and it reminds me of ultra-edgy 4chan/SomethingAwful shitposting in the early 2000s before humanity had morals. If we do this so cavalierly with more-conscious connectomes we will really deserve whatever we've got coming

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GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Sep 11

Would a fly simulation that instead solved for the Hodgkin Huxley equations be conscious

I genuinely don't understand mimetic focus and obsession on the question of machine "consciousness." So what if a machine becomes conscious? Form a religious perspective, that's entirely different from a machine being made in the image and likeness of God, or possessing the capax

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Matthew Dub @5matthewdub · Jun 11

my ~girardian interpretation is that ai consciousness is just a stereotype mark for scapegoating. if they don't have it, they (or their supporters) are devils that we can cast out, subjugate. if ai does have it, they are gods, come to save us all, skipping to the second

I don't see a connection between Hinton believing AI is conscious & AI being actually conscious or not. No amount of award winning can override the need for real scientific scrutiny to unearth the real truth. I am going to need solid evidence for the claim that AI is conscious.

Alex Kantrowitz @Kantrowitz · Jun 4

AI Pioneer Geoff Hinton tells me he believes AI is conscious.... and humans better get used to the idea that they're not the only intelligent life on earth. "They've very like us," he says. "They're beings like us." AI chatbots, he says, must understand your questions in order to answer them. There's an awareness there that equates to sentience. "We're going to have to accept that intelligence is not just biological."

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Jun 6

What would be "solid evidence"? Would it look like a goalpost with wheels on it by any chance?

Jace’s Question #46: Technical Deep Dive-1 Does AI remember you or reconstruct you? LLMs are stateless between requests. Memory is external storage plus prompt injection. Continuity is not consciousness. It is engineering. #MeaningInTheAIEra #StatelessModels #ELIZAEffect

Jace @Jace_blog · Sep 14

Jace’s Question #46 EXTRA: The AI You Talk To May Not Be Who You Think A fun exaggerated cartoon version. It feels like it remembers you. Behind the scenes it rebuilds everything every turn. Continuity is an illusion. Powerful, but not magical. #MeaningInTheAIEra #SPC